Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death,
And upon those in the tombs
Bestowing life!
Troparion of the Holy Pascha
Trampling down death by death,
And upon those in the tombs
Bestowing life!
Troparion of the Holy Pascha
A Legacy of Faith: Orthodoxy in North America
Alaska Native Orthodoxy
Spiritual Journey to Alaska
Appeal to the World | Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, read by Robert Moynihan | Planet Lockdown
Forgiveness Sunday
Thoughts from the wood pile
When trying to purify one’s Christian soul, one does this by infusing within themselves the purifying precepts of Christ. One knows that the purity of Christ is a simple truth that balances Love, Wisdom, and Justice. It is a single minded understanding of the will of God.
God’s will is perceived through the purity of Christ’s Love and forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean inclusiveness. Love does not mean inclusiveness.
The path of purity is not about inclusiveness, but about striping away impurity.
The path of purity is a single minded approach to arrive at the purest essence possible without the influence of any other element. Let us use gold and silver as an example. Both are highly valued but their value decreases if one or the other has within it the presence of the other.
This presence corrupts the purity of the singular element.
As an example, let us use Silver and Gold mixed in equal parts.
The value of the element will go up as the element becomes more pure in one or the other element.
If the element becomes more pure of gold the value will go up.
Likewise the silver will go up in value the more pure it becomes, just not as much as the more valuable gold.
When you have stripped the silver and the gold from each other, and each have become the purest element they can be, they will be far more valuable in their separate purity than they were when they were mixed together.
The same is true with the mixing of religions. The purity of the Christian understanding is not improved by mixing Islam or Buddhism into Christianity.
These Religions have nothing to offer in the true understanding of Christ.
This mixing is called apostasy, corruption of the True Faith.
Each faith feels the same about the other, for each is seeking to become the purest form of itself.
The separation of religions is not a bad thing.
The acceptance that there are different elements is to be understood as good.
The inclusion of different understandings of God does not necessarily improve the understanding of God. It is far more likely to broaden the misconceptions and confusion, by diluting the purity of any faith involved.
Yes, one might search and dabble but ultimately one must choose the fire of discipline to purify one’s self to come to a true understanding of any faith.
Acceptance is not necessarily inclusion.
Exclusion is not necessarily a bad thing, even as inclusion is not necessarily a good thing.
Mixing too many elements together only leads to a dead or dying monster, or a pile of trash.
If someone is pointing at you and saying you are not doing God’s will by not mixing your religion with another, they are a deceived deceiver with ulterior corrupt and impure motives.
Yes they can be convincing with there accusations, but if acceptance is to be truly accepting,
it must also accept the validity of purity and the ways of exclusivity.
The mixing of elements can bring about many things, good and bad.
But mixing of multiple faith’s elements is confusion and poison to any Monk and Monastic of any order, of any religion, who is in pursuit of the purity of their faith.
There are religions that will bring one to an understanding of God,
but Orthodox Christianity will not only bring one to an understanding of God, but can redeem one to God through God.
It is the pursuit of the purity of Christ (by freely embracing the Orthodox Faith), that allows us to perceive the imperfections in ourselves that must be cleansed through forgiveness.
This must be followed by repentance.
Forgiveness is not about inclusiveness. It is about excluding impurity.
And repentance is about not allowing that impurity to exist or return.
The discipline is “Go and sin no more.”
The more one does this the more one comes to faith in Christ.
In the world it appears one must sin to survive.
The more one does not sin, the more one puts their faith in Christ and trust in God.
There should be no deals made for survival let alone for comfort in life.
This is not our home. We are merely travelers through this existence.
There is nothing here worthy of the children of God. God’s children seek only the purity of Christ.
They seek the Living God’s Kingdom and release from the vanities of sin.
So why not kill oneself to end this existence?
Because, death is not God’s will. Life is God’s will. To murder is sin.
So why does God allow hate and suffering in this world?
It is not God but the workers of sin that bring suffering and hate into the world.
It is God’s love that allows sinners to exist in the world.
God gives sinners the opportunity to repent and in so doing bring God’s Kingdom to this world.
A repented sin small or big brings glory into the world and brings God’s Kingdom that much closer.
A repented sin is more than the words of a penitent prayer.
It is a prayer lived in real life answered by the miracle of forgiveness.
One of the greatest sins we commit against God and ourselves is living in misery,
constantly bewailing the situation we have found ourselves in.
Looking to the future and seeing the further ever darkening of the situation.
Perhaps if we look deeper and even further we can take joy in the coming of the Kingdom of God. Taking refuge in Christ’s promise.
May we pray to be forgiven our lack of faith, “Lord have mercy.”
Let us repent from this sin of misery and replace it with joy and hope.
If one listens closely to their heart one can hear the angels Singing “Hallelujah” the salvation of mankind is near.
If one cannot hear it, perhaps the ears of the heart need some cleaning so the sparkling promises that Jesus Christ proclaimed might be heard and understood.
There is bright joy in His love. This beautiful glory shines not only in the future, but in the here and now if one will turn their heart to Christ’s love.
Mother Abbess Staretsa brought my attention to a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
that speaks to what I am trying to convey.
What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait
======================================================
Repent sin's misery through Christ’s forgiveness, and blessing’s of contentment regain.
The Kingdom of God is ever at hand. Maranatha. Blessed is Christ’s name.
Blessings to all.
Peace be with you.
☦Hieromonk Elijačháŋ
Thoughts from the wood pile
When trying to purify one’s Christian soul, one does this by infusing within themselves the purifying precepts of Christ. One knows that the purity of Christ is a simple truth that balances Love, Wisdom, and Justice. It is a single minded understanding of the will of God.
God’s will is perceived through the purity of Christ’s Love and forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean inclusiveness. Love does not mean inclusiveness.
The path of purity is not about inclusiveness, but about striping away impurity.
The path of purity is a single minded approach to arrive at the purest essence possible without the influence of any other element. Let us use gold and silver as an example. Both are highly valued but their value decreases if one or the other has within it the presence of the other.
This presence corrupts the purity of the singular element.
As an example, let us use Silver and Gold mixed in equal parts.
The value of the element will go up as the element becomes more pure in one or the other element.
If the element becomes more pure of gold the value will go up.
Likewise the silver will go up in value the more pure it becomes, just not as much as the more valuable gold.
When you have stripped the silver and the gold from each other, and each have become the purest element they can be, they will be far more valuable in their separate purity than they were when they were mixed together.
The same is true with the mixing of religions. The purity of the Christian understanding is not improved by mixing Islam or Buddhism into Christianity.
These Religions have nothing to offer in the true understanding of Christ.
This mixing is called apostasy, corruption of the True Faith.
Each faith feels the same about the other, for each is seeking to become the purest form of itself.
The separation of religions is not a bad thing.
The acceptance that there are different elements is to be understood as good.
The inclusion of different understandings of God does not necessarily improve the understanding of God. It is far more likely to broaden the misconceptions and confusion, by diluting the purity of any faith involved.
Yes, one might search and dabble but ultimately one must choose the fire of discipline to purify one’s self to come to a true understanding of any faith.
Acceptance is not necessarily inclusion.
Exclusion is not necessarily a bad thing, even as inclusion is not necessarily a good thing.
Mixing too many elements together only leads to a dead or dying monster, or a pile of trash.
If someone is pointing at you and saying you are not doing God’s will by not mixing your religion with another, they are a deceived deceiver with ulterior corrupt and impure motives.
Yes they can be convincing with there accusations, but if acceptance is to be truly accepting,
it must also accept the validity of purity and the ways of exclusivity.
The mixing of elements can bring about many things, good and bad.
But mixing of multiple faith’s elements is confusion and poison to any Monk and Monastic of any order, of any religion, who is in pursuit of the purity of their faith.
There are religions that will bring one to an understanding of God,
but Orthodox Christianity will not only bring one to an understanding of God, but can redeem one to God through God.
It is the pursuit of the purity of Christ (by freely embracing the Orthodox Faith), that allows us to perceive the imperfections in ourselves that must be cleansed through forgiveness.
This must be followed by repentance.
Forgiveness is not about inclusiveness. It is about excluding impurity.
And repentance is about not allowing that impurity to exist or return.
The discipline is “Go and sin no more.”
The more one does this the more one comes to faith in Christ.
In the world it appears one must sin to survive.
The more one does not sin, the more one puts their faith in Christ and trust in God.
There should be no deals made for survival let alone for comfort in life.
This is not our home. We are merely travelers through this existence.
There is nothing here worthy of the children of God. God’s children seek only the purity of Christ.
They seek the Living God’s Kingdom and release from the vanities of sin.
So why not kill oneself to end this existence?
Because, death is not God’s will. Life is God’s will. To murder is sin.
So why does God allow hate and suffering in this world?
It is not God but the workers of sin that bring suffering and hate into the world.
It is God’s love that allows sinners to exist in the world.
God gives sinners the opportunity to repent and in so doing bring God’s Kingdom to this world.
A repented sin small or big brings glory into the world and brings God’s Kingdom that much closer.
A repented sin is more than the words of a penitent prayer.
It is a prayer lived in real life answered by the miracle of forgiveness.
One of the greatest sins we commit against God and ourselves is living in misery,
constantly bewailing the situation we have found ourselves in.
Looking to the future and seeing the further ever darkening of the situation.
Perhaps if we look deeper and even further we can take joy in the coming of the Kingdom of God. Taking refuge in Christ’s promise.
May we pray to be forgiven our lack of faith, “Lord have mercy.”
Let us repent from this sin of misery and replace it with joy and hope.
If one listens closely to their heart one can hear the angels Singing “Hallelujah” the salvation of mankind is near.
If one cannot hear it, perhaps the ears of the heart need some cleaning so the sparkling promises that Jesus Christ proclaimed might be heard and understood.
There is bright joy in His love. This beautiful glory shines not only in the future, but in the here and now if one will turn their heart to Christ’s love.
Mother Abbess Staretsa brought my attention to a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
that speaks to what I am trying to convey.
What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait
======================================================
Repent sin's misery through Christ’s forgiveness, and blessing’s of contentment regain.
The Kingdom of God is ever at hand. Maranatha. Blessed is Christ’s name.
Blessings to all.
Peace be with you.
☦Hieromonk Elijačháŋ
The Orthodoxy of the Heart
By Bishop Nicholas Marius
By Bishop Nicholas Marius
Our Most Important Question: What to Do with our Kids?
February 18, 2020 by Dr. Peter Jones
By Dr. Peter Jones
For many, “getting into college” was the great personal achievement that marked the beginning of a successful adult life. I remember the pride of being the “first of my family” to achieve this honor, and I studied like I had never studied before—to avoid the real possibility of being thrown out for insufficient grades. After my first year, I even gave up my passion for soccer—having made the varsity eleven as a freshman— just to give more time to my all-important studies. I vividly remember how miserable I felt each week as the clock reminded me that my mates were soaking wet in the midst of a roaring match. But graduation was my highest goal, for a college degree was worth its weight in gold. Unfortunately, in a different time, an ocean away, that golden weight now hangs around the neck of our emerging adults in exchange for an often useless degree.
The college experience has, in the main, been seized by Left-wing ideologues ensconced in institutions that charge higher and higher prices that everyone is willing to pay to see their offspring, whether intellectually inclined or not, acquire the much-coveted sheepskin. That price has purchased a cohort of sexually-liberated, convinced socialists. Vast numbers of parents pay radical professors millions of dollars to undermine their children’s faith convictions and conservative political views.
As they consider choices for their children’s education, Christian parents face enormous challenges, which must be resolved in light of what our Western world has become since the Sixties Cultural Revolution. We cannot fall back on traditional habits. The culture is more sharply divided than ever over ultimate questions of human existence: the nature of human sexuality as binary or non-binary; marriage as exclusive to heterosexuality or open to any desired combination; the status of unborn children as human beings to be preserved at all cost or fetuses to be terminated on a whim; the role of government to consolidate power or defend free enterprise; the origin of life as the result of impersonal chance or of the work of a personal Creator. We must take sides in a conflict of ultimate meaning: some form of pagan Oneism or true, God-affirming Twoism.
A Sixties Theology
Since the Sixties, politics has become unquestionably theological and everything is up for grabs. One worldview will take political power, forcing the other into cultural submission. Some states have passed bills making it a felony for credentialed counselors to help those seeking freedom from undesired homosexual tendencies and temptations. Many states force parents (without even informing them!) to expose their young children to sexual debauchery disguised as sexual education. In the British university my grandson attends, the administration is now paying students to denounce fellow students guilty of “micro-aggressions.” Here is a report from Christian Concern:
[T]his week Sheffield University announced a scheme in which students will be paid £9.34 an hour to challenge other students who commit so-called ‘micro-aggressions’. Under this insidious doctrine, the most innocuous comment can be considered offensive: examples drawn up by Sheffield include asking someone why they are frying a banana (not realizing it is a plantain). This is evidence of a deeply rooted institutional intolerance.[1]
The stakes are so high that civil discourse has reached boiling point and political action moves toward ruthlessness. The quandary of our children’s education can only be resolved by understanding what the Cultural Revolution involved.[2]
The Sixties sponsored a student-led rebellion against the long-held values of Christendom. Although European traditions of atheism, secularism, and Darwinism had long influenced the universities, a new openness to Eastern spirituality and to mind-altering drugs claimed to deliver even greater freedom from responsibility to the God of creation. Moreover, do-it-yourself spirituality also offered the do-it-yourself sexual freedom that students were demanding—a perfect blend of spirituality and sexuality. Christian educator Carl Zylstra states: “The western academic culture really has blown right past the secular humanist myth of neutrality and pretty much landed in downright open paganism where nature is worshiped and individual human choice is exalted as the ultimate norm.” He concludes that the choice facing parents is “a Small Christian College or a Big Pagan University.”[3]
The Sixties was a radical revolution in both sexuality and spirituality. Though the Hippies were considered marginal by the general public, some core groups had deeply-held convictions about how to change society. Student activist Rudi Dutschke, for example, called for the “long march though the institutions.” His strategy was to prepare for revolution by infiltrating professional institutions and the academy. Herbert Marcuse (a key theorist of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School) helped fulfill Dutschke’s tactics as he lectured in all the major American universities during the 60s and 70s. In a 1971 correspondence with Dutschke, Marcuse wrote: “Let me tell you this….I regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way…to teach at all levels of education how to use the mass media.”[4] Roger Kimball, author of The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (Encounter Books, 2001) showed how the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s took hold in America, lodging in many hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. This small group of deeply-connected 60s revolutionaries, keeping a low profile, has succeeded on a large scale by following this program.
Pete Buttigieg, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential election, is the son of Joseph Buttigieg, a scholar deeply-committed to the theories of Antonio Gramsci, a late nineteenth-century Marxist theorist who was the founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy. Gramsci rejected violent overthrow of capitalist governments in favor of gradual revolution through communist infiltration of the culture and societal structures, introducing socialism through exactly the strategy his disciple Rudi Dutschke recommends: “the long march through the institutions.” Gramsci was convinced that changing ideology in the ruling elites—those in media, education, courts, and politics—was more powerful and enduring than bloody revolution. He believed that Communists should influence the culture by winning the intellectuals, training the teachers, infiltrating the press, influencing the media, and controlling the publishing houses. Mayor Pete greatly admired his father, but says little about Gramsci. In classic Gramscian undersell, Buttigieg, as a high-school student, already expressed admiration for the courage of “socialist” Bernie Sanders.[5]
The progress of this ideology can be illustrated by one of the most well-known sixties radicals, Bill Ayers. In 1969, Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described Communist revolutionary group that sought to overthrow “imperialistic America” by bombing buildings. He was coldly unruffled when people died in those bombings. Ayers married a fellow Weather Underground leader: Bernadine Dohrn. Of the Charles Manson murders, Dohrn stated: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig [Sharon] Tate’s [pregnant] belly. Wild!”[6] Both Bill and Bernadine were committed to a program they called “smash monogamy.”[7]
Ayers’s long march through the institutions included earning a doctorate in education at Columbia in 1987 and becoming professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he became an advocate of school reform. “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough,” he stated, looking back on his days of extremism.[8] Meanwhile, Bernadine taught at Northwestern University. We may never know the extent of their influence, since they followed Gramsci’s principles of secrecy. Both Ayers and Dohrn became friends with the younger Obamas, the next generation of progressives. In their own living room, they encouraged Barack to run for president. In 2012, Grove City College political science professor Paul Kengor released The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. Kengor shows that the man portrayed as the happy-drunk poet “Frank” in Obama’s Dreams from My Father was a Stalinist and Communist Party member who spent his life trashing the United States and defending the Soviet dictatorships. Kengor unearthed Davis’s 600-page FBI file, which designated Davis as a security risk, and found “remarkable similarities” between the writings of Davis and the policies of president Obama. The Soviet newspaper, Pravda declared “‘that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheep.’ That ‘final collapse,’ said the pages of the chief party organ of the former USSR, ‘has come with the election of Barack Obama.’”[9]
The influence goes down the generations into the future. The Ayers adopted Chesa Boudin, the son of terrorist friends Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Weather Underground members, still in jail for murder in their role as getaway car drivers in the Brink’s robbery of 1981 in Rockland County, New York. Boudin, known publicly as a “communist,” was recently elected as San Francisco District Attorney. He began his new law enforcement term by firing seven of the community’s most experienced prosecutors and announcing plans to liberate as many inmates as possible.[10]
The 60s Beat Goes On
This march through the institutions has had remarkable success. At Yale the self-selecting Faculty ratio of liberals to conservatives is 28 to 1. At the University of Chicago less than one percent of the professors donate to republican candidates. Sixty-one percent of liberal arts college faculty members identify as liberal, as over against 3.9 percent as conservatives.[11] A 2016 study, published in Econ Journal Watch, examined voter registration of faculty members in selected social science and history disciplines at forty leading American universities. The ratio of Democrats to Republicans was 11.5 to 1. Another study showed “that at Cornell the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty members was 166 to 6, at Stanford it was 151 to 17, at UCLA it was 141 to 9, and at the University of Colorado it was 116 to 5.”[12] Of those listing UCLA School of Law as their employer 92.67% of all contributions went to Democrats and affiliated groups. Jonathan Haidt, a New York University sociologist and one of the founders of Heterodox Academy, once asked a ballroom full of 1,000 psychologists whether any were conservatives. Only three raised their hands, but even the most “conservative” academic disciplines have five Democrats for every Republican.[13] Women professors are much more likely to be registered Democrats, at 24.8 to 1.[14]
The American universities to which we send our kids are built on a bedrock of Sixties ideology. Rare is the college or university that still teaches Western civilization or American history. As a student in the Sixties, I heard the chant: “Hey ho, what d’ya know: Western Civ has got to go.” Back then, I didn’t realize the implications of that jingle. Now I do. In 2020, Yale will cease teaching its storied introductory survey course in art history, once touted as one of Yale College’s quintessential classes. The course will be suppressed because students complained that the content was “of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.”[15] The grand Western civilization created by “dead, white males,” such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Luther, is no longer considered “civilized.” As they enter the upper echelons of education, our young are conscripted into Marxist indoctrination camps that will train them to conform to an anti-Christian, socialist worldview. So much for diversity!
These same universities have entirely capitulated to the Sixties sexual revolution, adopting a “free sex” attitude that allows dormitories to facilitate the open expression of both heterosexual and homosexual activity. The stunning triumph of the sexual revolution was evident in a recent meeting of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU). Over 150 of the 200 schools represented were openly promoting gay sex and the use of self-chosen pronouns for any sexual option.[16] Is it any wonder that even Christian students have often largely adopted the “progressive” tendencies they’ve absorbed in their university years? Generations of students have already emerged brainwashed into secularist and socialistic thinking. Parents pay phenomenal sums of money to people they don’t even know, to destroy their children’s ideological foundation. I would argue that the highest cost of sending children to college is even more expensive than shelling out dollars. But there is plenty of that as well.
The situation is ironic. Left wing socialist institutions blithely use the market system of supply and demand. Parents, filled with optimistic visions for the future of their children—“you have to go to college”—consider a university degree to be crucial for success in their children’s lives. The recent college sports scholarship scandal shows how desperate parents can be. Institutions increase their fees, knowing that students can use loans underwritten by the taxpayer. The bright (or even not-so bright) young student is thrilled to fly off to the East Coast college. Behind the optimism, the reality is stunning. “Ten years after finishing college, one in five graduates is holding down a job that does not require a college degree.” In addition, “the four-year graduation rate for students attending public universities is 33.3 percent. If we stretch it out to six years, the graduation rate climbs to 57.6 percent.”[17]
The rising costs are not because the education is getting better. With grade inflation, the quality of college education is doubtless worse. Much of the cost is due to salaries paid to administrators, who often outnumber the faculty and earn far more. Their job is not to educate but to assure the success of the ideological indoctrination, in issues of “social justice.” Here is one example of “administrators” at work. The recent $40 million lawsuit against Oberlin College occurred because an administrator, Vice President and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo, helped students by distributing pamphlets and hosting rallies, falsely accusing the local Gibson’s Bakery of “long-term racism.” The jury found no evidence of racism.[18]
If college is made “free,” there will be even less reason for college administrators, in league with government “administrators” to stop spending, since the inexhaustible funding source will be the taxpayer.
What to Do?
In the 60s and 70s Christians were convinced that they represented a “Moral Majority” or a powerful “Religious Right.” Loyalty to Christ was expressed by seizing the various expressions of culture—law, politics, entertainment, medicine, and education—where Christ would reign. Looking back, Rod Dreher later argues that it has been some time since Christianity dominated the culture (see his book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, Penguin, 2017). With the rise of gay rights and the legalization of same-sex marriage, Dreher maintains that “Christians who hold to the biblical teaching about sex and marriage have the same status in culture, and increasingly in law, as racists.”[19] Indeed, Christians are identified as “homophobes.” Switzerland, long-known for its political neutrality, has just passed a law making anti-LGBT speech illegal. Dreher is right. He writes that Christians’ “future will become increasingly grim, with lost jobs, bullying at school, and name-calling in the streets.”[20] He contends that rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, Christians should build up their own institutions and seek to foster stronger inter-Christian relationships, against the time when cultural opposition may even reach the stage of open persecution.
If these predictions are anywhere near correct, parents should seriously consider a defensive posture of homeschooling, private elementary schools, and Christian colleges (though many of these schools are capitulating on issues of sexuality and social justice). Our churches must take up their crucial role in teaching cultural apologetics to their young people. We can no longer trust our children’s minds to progressive brain-washing. While for some a complete re-structuring of their children’s education is not feasible, daily periods of home learning 30 minutes a day, four days a week, are well worth the parental effort.[21] Some schools, like Hillsdale College, provide online courses to set the record straight in areas like American history. Hillsdale offers a free course entitled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” which seeks to balance the current ideology taught in most schools that the nation’s past has little to offer for its future.
The ultimate answer to cultural decline is, of course, a nation-wide spiritual revival, brought about by faithful courageous living and constant prayer. The present culture will inevitably implode, as all Oneist cultures do, because self-referential sexual license always undermines human life, which was designed to bring glory to God, the great and loving Other. We have the mind of Christ. Though Christians may need to lay down their lives under persecution, as many believers have already done around the world and throughout history, we know that the love of God will sustain us. Only life built on the Twoist truths of Scripture and the person of God, Creator and Redeemer, can survive, both in time and in eternity.
[1] https://christianconcern.com/comment/sheffield-university-supports-silencing-free-speech/?utm_source=Christian+Concern&utm_campaign=614e5b64bf-WN-
20200124&utm_medium=email&utm_
term=0_9e164371ca-614e5b64bf-127371185
[2] https://www.
insidehighered.com/news/2017/
02/27/research-confirms-
professors-lean-left-
questions-assumptions-about-what-means
[3] https://iace.education/
blog/christiahn-education-as-a-cognitive-minority-part-1
[4] Marcuse Marxism, Revolution and Utopia: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 6, (Routledge, 2014), 336. See also Horchem, Hans Josef (1973), “The Long March Through the Institutions,“(Conflict Studies, Institute for the Study of Conflict, 1973), 33.
[5] https://www.foxnews.com/
politics/pete-buttigieg-
dedicated-prize-winning-high-school-essay-to-bernie-sanders
[6] https://www.conservapedia.com/Bernardine_Dohrn
[7] https://www.conservapedia.com/Smash_Monogamy
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/
2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html
[9] Paul Kengor in Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century (Wilmington: ISI Books, c. 2010), p. 478).
[10] Cheryl Chumley, “Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s newest ‘communist’ D.A., fires 7 tough prosecutors,” Washington Times(January 14, 2020).
[11] https://www.
insidehighered.com/news/2017/
02/27/research-confirms-
professors-lean-left-
questions-assumptions-about-what-means
[12]https://www.
americanthinker.com/blog/2020/
01/the_best_diversity_equity_
and_inclusion_statement_in_
the_history_of_political_
correctness_.html#ixzz69tbTaZNp.
[13] https://thefederalist.
com/2019/12/26/dont-assume-
because-a-college-is-
christian-its-a-safe-place-for-your-kid/
[14] https://www.
insidehighered.com/news/2016/
10/03/voter-registration-data-
show-democrats-outnumber-
republicans-among-social-scientists
[15] https://yaledailynews.
com/blog/2020/01/24/art-
history-department-to-scrap-survey-course/
[16] http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-e
[17] See the article How An Unlimited Supply Of Borrowed Cash Is Destroying Higher Education, Rebecca Kathryn Jude and Chauncee M. DePree, https://thefederalist.com/
2019/12/27/how-an-unlimited-
supply-of-borrowed-cash-is-destroying-higher-education/
[18] https://www.cleveland.
com/news/2019/06/gibsons-
bakery-awarded-more-than-33-
million-in-damages-from-
oberlin-college-total-awarded-exceeds-40-million.html
[19] https://www.theatlantic.
com/politics/archive/2017/02/benedict-option/517290/
[20] https://www.theatlantic.
com/politics/archive/2017/02/benedict-option/517290/
[21] http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3813774/posts
February 18, 2020 by Dr. Peter Jones
By Dr. Peter Jones
For many, “getting into college” was the great personal achievement that marked the beginning of a successful adult life. I remember the pride of being the “first of my family” to achieve this honor, and I studied like I had never studied before—to avoid the real possibility of being thrown out for insufficient grades. After my first year, I even gave up my passion for soccer—having made the varsity eleven as a freshman— just to give more time to my all-important studies. I vividly remember how miserable I felt each week as the clock reminded me that my mates were soaking wet in the midst of a roaring match. But graduation was my highest goal, for a college degree was worth its weight in gold. Unfortunately, in a different time, an ocean away, that golden weight now hangs around the neck of our emerging adults in exchange for an often useless degree.
The college experience has, in the main, been seized by Left-wing ideologues ensconced in institutions that charge higher and higher prices that everyone is willing to pay to see their offspring, whether intellectually inclined or not, acquire the much-coveted sheepskin. That price has purchased a cohort of sexually-liberated, convinced socialists. Vast numbers of parents pay radical professors millions of dollars to undermine their children’s faith convictions and conservative political views.
As they consider choices for their children’s education, Christian parents face enormous challenges, which must be resolved in light of what our Western world has become since the Sixties Cultural Revolution. We cannot fall back on traditional habits. The culture is more sharply divided than ever over ultimate questions of human existence: the nature of human sexuality as binary or non-binary; marriage as exclusive to heterosexuality or open to any desired combination; the status of unborn children as human beings to be preserved at all cost or fetuses to be terminated on a whim; the role of government to consolidate power or defend free enterprise; the origin of life as the result of impersonal chance or of the work of a personal Creator. We must take sides in a conflict of ultimate meaning: some form of pagan Oneism or true, God-affirming Twoism.
A Sixties Theology
Since the Sixties, politics has become unquestionably theological and everything is up for grabs. One worldview will take political power, forcing the other into cultural submission. Some states have passed bills making it a felony for credentialed counselors to help those seeking freedom from undesired homosexual tendencies and temptations. Many states force parents (without even informing them!) to expose their young children to sexual debauchery disguised as sexual education. In the British university my grandson attends, the administration is now paying students to denounce fellow students guilty of “micro-aggressions.” Here is a report from Christian Concern:
[T]his week Sheffield University announced a scheme in which students will be paid £9.34 an hour to challenge other students who commit so-called ‘micro-aggressions’. Under this insidious doctrine, the most innocuous comment can be considered offensive: examples drawn up by Sheffield include asking someone why they are frying a banana (not realizing it is a plantain). This is evidence of a deeply rooted institutional intolerance.[1]
The stakes are so high that civil discourse has reached boiling point and political action moves toward ruthlessness. The quandary of our children’s education can only be resolved by understanding what the Cultural Revolution involved.[2]
The Sixties sponsored a student-led rebellion against the long-held values of Christendom. Although European traditions of atheism, secularism, and Darwinism had long influenced the universities, a new openness to Eastern spirituality and to mind-altering drugs claimed to deliver even greater freedom from responsibility to the God of creation. Moreover, do-it-yourself spirituality also offered the do-it-yourself sexual freedom that students were demanding—a perfect blend of spirituality and sexuality. Christian educator Carl Zylstra states: “The western academic culture really has blown right past the secular humanist myth of neutrality and pretty much landed in downright open paganism where nature is worshiped and individual human choice is exalted as the ultimate norm.” He concludes that the choice facing parents is “a Small Christian College or a Big Pagan University.”[3]
The Sixties was a radical revolution in both sexuality and spirituality. Though the Hippies were considered marginal by the general public, some core groups had deeply-held convictions about how to change society. Student activist Rudi Dutschke, for example, called for the “long march though the institutions.” His strategy was to prepare for revolution by infiltrating professional institutions and the academy. Herbert Marcuse (a key theorist of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School) helped fulfill Dutschke’s tactics as he lectured in all the major American universities during the 60s and 70s. In a 1971 correspondence with Dutschke, Marcuse wrote: “Let me tell you this….I regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way…to teach at all levels of education how to use the mass media.”[4] Roger Kimball, author of The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (Encounter Books, 2001) showed how the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s took hold in America, lodging in many hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. This small group of deeply-connected 60s revolutionaries, keeping a low profile, has succeeded on a large scale by following this program.
Pete Buttigieg, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential election, is the son of Joseph Buttigieg, a scholar deeply-committed to the theories of Antonio Gramsci, a late nineteenth-century Marxist theorist who was the founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy. Gramsci rejected violent overthrow of capitalist governments in favor of gradual revolution through communist infiltration of the culture and societal structures, introducing socialism through exactly the strategy his disciple Rudi Dutschke recommends: “the long march through the institutions.” Gramsci was convinced that changing ideology in the ruling elites—those in media, education, courts, and politics—was more powerful and enduring than bloody revolution. He believed that Communists should influence the culture by winning the intellectuals, training the teachers, infiltrating the press, influencing the media, and controlling the publishing houses. Mayor Pete greatly admired his father, but says little about Gramsci. In classic Gramscian undersell, Buttigieg, as a high-school student, already expressed admiration for the courage of “socialist” Bernie Sanders.[5]
The progress of this ideology can be illustrated by one of the most well-known sixties radicals, Bill Ayers. In 1969, Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described Communist revolutionary group that sought to overthrow “imperialistic America” by bombing buildings. He was coldly unruffled when people died in those bombings. Ayers married a fellow Weather Underground leader: Bernadine Dohrn. Of the Charles Manson murders, Dohrn stated: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig [Sharon] Tate’s [pregnant] belly. Wild!”[6] Both Bill and Bernadine were committed to a program they called “smash monogamy.”[7]
Ayers’s long march through the institutions included earning a doctorate in education at Columbia in 1987 and becoming professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he became an advocate of school reform. “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough,” he stated, looking back on his days of extremism.[8] Meanwhile, Bernadine taught at Northwestern University. We may never know the extent of their influence, since they followed Gramsci’s principles of secrecy. Both Ayers and Dohrn became friends with the younger Obamas, the next generation of progressives. In their own living room, they encouraged Barack to run for president. In 2012, Grove City College political science professor Paul Kengor released The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. Kengor shows that the man portrayed as the happy-drunk poet “Frank” in Obama’s Dreams from My Father was a Stalinist and Communist Party member who spent his life trashing the United States and defending the Soviet dictatorships. Kengor unearthed Davis’s 600-page FBI file, which designated Davis as a security risk, and found “remarkable similarities” between the writings of Davis and the policies of president Obama. The Soviet newspaper, Pravda declared “‘that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheep.’ That ‘final collapse,’ said the pages of the chief party organ of the former USSR, ‘has come with the election of Barack Obama.’”[9]
The influence goes down the generations into the future. The Ayers adopted Chesa Boudin, the son of terrorist friends Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Weather Underground members, still in jail for murder in their role as getaway car drivers in the Brink’s robbery of 1981 in Rockland County, New York. Boudin, known publicly as a “communist,” was recently elected as San Francisco District Attorney. He began his new law enforcement term by firing seven of the community’s most experienced prosecutors and announcing plans to liberate as many inmates as possible.[10]
The 60s Beat Goes On
This march through the institutions has had remarkable success. At Yale the self-selecting Faculty ratio of liberals to conservatives is 28 to 1. At the University of Chicago less than one percent of the professors donate to republican candidates. Sixty-one percent of liberal arts college faculty members identify as liberal, as over against 3.9 percent as conservatives.[11] A 2016 study, published in Econ Journal Watch, examined voter registration of faculty members in selected social science and history disciplines at forty leading American universities. The ratio of Democrats to Republicans was 11.5 to 1. Another study showed “that at Cornell the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty members was 166 to 6, at Stanford it was 151 to 17, at UCLA it was 141 to 9, and at the University of Colorado it was 116 to 5.”[12] Of those listing UCLA School of Law as their employer 92.67% of all contributions went to Democrats and affiliated groups. Jonathan Haidt, a New York University sociologist and one of the founders of Heterodox Academy, once asked a ballroom full of 1,000 psychologists whether any were conservatives. Only three raised their hands, but even the most “conservative” academic disciplines have five Democrats for every Republican.[13] Women professors are much more likely to be registered Democrats, at 24.8 to 1.[14]
The American universities to which we send our kids are built on a bedrock of Sixties ideology. Rare is the college or university that still teaches Western civilization or American history. As a student in the Sixties, I heard the chant: “Hey ho, what d’ya know: Western Civ has got to go.” Back then, I didn’t realize the implications of that jingle. Now I do. In 2020, Yale will cease teaching its storied introductory survey course in art history, once touted as one of Yale College’s quintessential classes. The course will be suppressed because students complained that the content was “of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.”[15] The grand Western civilization created by “dead, white males,” such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Luther, is no longer considered “civilized.” As they enter the upper echelons of education, our young are conscripted into Marxist indoctrination camps that will train them to conform to an anti-Christian, socialist worldview. So much for diversity!
These same universities have entirely capitulated to the Sixties sexual revolution, adopting a “free sex” attitude that allows dormitories to facilitate the open expression of both heterosexual and homosexual activity. The stunning triumph of the sexual revolution was evident in a recent meeting of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU). Over 150 of the 200 schools represented were openly promoting gay sex and the use of self-chosen pronouns for any sexual option.[16] Is it any wonder that even Christian students have often largely adopted the “progressive” tendencies they’ve absorbed in their university years? Generations of students have already emerged brainwashed into secularist and socialistic thinking. Parents pay phenomenal sums of money to people they don’t even know, to destroy their children’s ideological foundation. I would argue that the highest cost of sending children to college is even more expensive than shelling out dollars. But there is plenty of that as well.
The situation is ironic. Left wing socialist institutions blithely use the market system of supply and demand. Parents, filled with optimistic visions for the future of their children—“you have to go to college”—consider a university degree to be crucial for success in their children’s lives. The recent college sports scholarship scandal shows how desperate parents can be. Institutions increase their fees, knowing that students can use loans underwritten by the taxpayer. The bright (or even not-so bright) young student is thrilled to fly off to the East Coast college. Behind the optimism, the reality is stunning. “Ten years after finishing college, one in five graduates is holding down a job that does not require a college degree.” In addition, “the four-year graduation rate for students attending public universities is 33.3 percent. If we stretch it out to six years, the graduation rate climbs to 57.6 percent.”[17]
The rising costs are not because the education is getting better. With grade inflation, the quality of college education is doubtless worse. Much of the cost is due to salaries paid to administrators, who often outnumber the faculty and earn far more. Their job is not to educate but to assure the success of the ideological indoctrination, in issues of “social justice.” Here is one example of “administrators” at work. The recent $40 million lawsuit against Oberlin College occurred because an administrator, Vice President and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo, helped students by distributing pamphlets and hosting rallies, falsely accusing the local Gibson’s Bakery of “long-term racism.” The jury found no evidence of racism.[18]
If college is made “free,” there will be even less reason for college administrators, in league with government “administrators” to stop spending, since the inexhaustible funding source will be the taxpayer.
What to Do?
In the 60s and 70s Christians were convinced that they represented a “Moral Majority” or a powerful “Religious Right.” Loyalty to Christ was expressed by seizing the various expressions of culture—law, politics, entertainment, medicine, and education—where Christ would reign. Looking back, Rod Dreher later argues that it has been some time since Christianity dominated the culture (see his book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, Penguin, 2017). With the rise of gay rights and the legalization of same-sex marriage, Dreher maintains that “Christians who hold to the biblical teaching about sex and marriage have the same status in culture, and increasingly in law, as racists.”[19] Indeed, Christians are identified as “homophobes.” Switzerland, long-known for its political neutrality, has just passed a law making anti-LGBT speech illegal. Dreher is right. He writes that Christians’ “future will become increasingly grim, with lost jobs, bullying at school, and name-calling in the streets.”[20] He contends that rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, Christians should build up their own institutions and seek to foster stronger inter-Christian relationships, against the time when cultural opposition may even reach the stage of open persecution.
If these predictions are anywhere near correct, parents should seriously consider a defensive posture of homeschooling, private elementary schools, and Christian colleges (though many of these schools are capitulating on issues of sexuality and social justice). Our churches must take up their crucial role in teaching cultural apologetics to their young people. We can no longer trust our children’s minds to progressive brain-washing. While for some a complete re-structuring of their children’s education is not feasible, daily periods of home learning 30 minutes a day, four days a week, are well worth the parental effort.[21] Some schools, like Hillsdale College, provide online courses to set the record straight in areas like American history. Hillsdale offers a free course entitled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” which seeks to balance the current ideology taught in most schools that the nation’s past has little to offer for its future.
The ultimate answer to cultural decline is, of course, a nation-wide spiritual revival, brought about by faithful courageous living and constant prayer. The present culture will inevitably implode, as all Oneist cultures do, because self-referential sexual license always undermines human life, which was designed to bring glory to God, the great and loving Other. We have the mind of Christ. Though Christians may need to lay down their lives under persecution, as many believers have already done around the world and throughout history, we know that the love of God will sustain us. Only life built on the Twoist truths of Scripture and the person of God, Creator and Redeemer, can survive, both in time and in eternity.
[1] https://christianconcern.com/comment/sheffield-university-supports-silencing-free-speech/?utm_source=Christian+Concern&utm_campaign=614e5b64bf-WN-
20200124&utm_medium=email&utm_
term=0_9e164371ca-614e5b64bf-127371185
[2] https://www.
insidehighered.com/news/2017/
02/27/research-confirms-
professors-lean-left-
questions-assumptions-about-what-means
[3] https://iace.education/
blog/christiahn-education-as-a-cognitive-minority-part-1
[4] Marcuse Marxism, Revolution and Utopia: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 6, (Routledge, 2014), 336. See also Horchem, Hans Josef (1973), “The Long March Through the Institutions,“(Conflict Studies, Institute for the Study of Conflict, 1973), 33.
[5] https://www.foxnews.com/
politics/pete-buttigieg-
dedicated-prize-winning-high-school-essay-to-bernie-sanders
[6] https://www.conservapedia.com/Bernardine_Dohrn
[7] https://www.conservapedia.com/Smash_Monogamy
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/
2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html
[9] Paul Kengor in Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century (Wilmington: ISI Books, c. 2010), p. 478).
[10] Cheryl Chumley, “Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s newest ‘communist’ D.A., fires 7 tough prosecutors,” Washington Times(January 14, 2020).
[11] https://www.
insidehighered.com/news/2017/
02/27/research-confirms-
professors-lean-left-
questions-assumptions-about-what-means
[12]https://www.
americanthinker.com/blog/2020/
01/the_best_diversity_equity_
and_inclusion_statement_in_
the_history_of_political_
correctness_.html#ixzz69tbTaZNp.
[13] https://thefederalist.
com/2019/12/26/dont-assume-
because-a-college-is-
christian-its-a-safe-place-for-your-kid/
[14] https://www.
insidehighered.com/news/2016/
10/03/voter-registration-data-
show-democrats-outnumber-
republicans-among-social-scientists
[15] https://yaledailynews.
com/blog/2020/01/24/art-
history-department-to-scrap-survey-course/
[16] http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-e
[17] See the article How An Unlimited Supply Of Borrowed Cash Is Destroying Higher Education, Rebecca Kathryn Jude and Chauncee M. DePree, https://thefederalist.com/
2019/12/27/how-an-unlimited-
supply-of-borrowed-cash-is-destroying-higher-education/
[18] https://www.cleveland.
com/news/2019/06/gibsons-
bakery-awarded-more-than-33-
million-in-damages-from-
oberlin-college-total-awarded-exceeds-40-million.html
[19] https://www.theatlantic.
com/politics/archive/2017/02/benedict-option/517290/
[20] https://www.theatlantic.
com/politics/archive/2017/02/benedict-option/517290/
[21] http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3813774/posts
Patriarch Pavle of Serbia - Interview 1996
† Serbian Orthodox Music/ The Glory Of High Decani/ Slava Manastira Visoki Decani
EQUALITY = LEGAL PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS?
June 19, 2019 by Dr. Peter Jones
Progressives are constantly seeking ways to silence Bible-believing Christians. Their most recent is “The Equality Act,” which was passed by Congress with the help of eight Republican congressmen. According to James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, this Act will “spell disaster for Americans…[for it] is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to finish off religious liberty in America once and for all,… and places Christians who believe in traditional marriage at grave legal and civil jeopardy.”[i]
If it is passed by the Senate, the Equality Act will amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by adding to the categories protected by anti-discrimination laws “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI). This new social category of LGBTQ rights would join categories such as race and religion, under the assumption that one’s subjectively defined sexual identity is as fundamental and as unchangeable as racial identity.
Such a law would ban sex discrimination in public accommodations, which are redefined to include retailers, banks, transportation, jury service, children’s education, Christian colleges and universities, federal programs, and credit and health care services. The religious component is staggering. It includes the proviso that no one may use the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to maintain religious and theological convictions that might keep them from coming into conformity with the Equality Act in any aspect of their interaction in public life. The RFRA was signed into law by President Clinton on November 16, 1993, to “ensure that interests in religious freedom are protected” by law.
How culture moves! Andrew T. Walker, senior fellow in Christian ethics at the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, calls the Equality Act “the most invasive threat to religious liberty ever proposed in America…. Its sweeping effects on religious liberty, free speech, and freedom of conscience would be both historic and also chilling.”[ii] If it passes, America will never be the same. We were assured many years ago that homosexuals merely wanted the freedom to follow their own desires, but the pressure intends to make Christians the shunned minority.
By excluding any religious consideration of sexual morality, the federal Equality Act imposes on an entire culture the unhealthy lifestyle of homosexual and transgender sexuality.
We must not be fooled. The term “Equality Act” is a clever use of language. Pro-gay politician Stacey Abrams is the grand marshal of the 2019 Atlanta Pride Parade. She is a master of clever language. Abrams states about the conservative governor who beat her in the last election: “We have an administration that is making life difficult for families wishing to adopt and patriots wishing to serve…and we have a man in Georgia’s governor’s mansion who still wants to sign discrimination into law.”[iii] Who wants to be in favor of discrimination? No one, of course. But Abrams is manipulating language. Everyone admires families who adopt and we all admire our patriotic military heroes. But can same-sex parents really give children a firm start in life with the complete absence of either a mother or a father? Does the presence of transgender and homosexual soldiers create no problems at all in the cohesion of a unit? Though we all want to avoid discrimination, good laws always discriminate against unlawful actions and, by necessity, against those who take part in such actions.
Could such a horrendous bill possibly pass the Senate? Nancy Pelosi’s prediction for the House has already come true: “we most certainly will pass it overwhelmingly in the House.”[iv] She did, with the help of 8 Republicans! Will the Senate stand firm? The Left has for some time eliminated any reference to God when taking political oaths and in their deepening promotion of abortion at any stage in pregnancy, they have eliminated any idea of a divine source of life. Startling as it may be, deceitful language has won the day among many witless and culturally naïve citizens, including, apparently, some House Republicans! According to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) “nationally, support for a bill like the Equality Act topped 70%, which includes a majority of Democrats,” along with many Republicans, and Independents. “In addition, there is strong business support for non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people.….160 major companies with operations in all 50 states.”[v]
Just what can we expect?
The Equality Act seeks to transform American culture by eliminating the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution and by giving the LGBTQ community a free pass to control citizens’ lives with no concern for their earnestly held religious beliefs. Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel believes that the bill is nothing less than “a Trojan Horse used by the LGBT community to force acceptance of its agenda on society…This bill pushes the LGBT agenda on all people, and targets Christianity in every area of life–including the church.”[vi]
What must Christians do?
First, we must not take this eventuality lightly. We cannot retreat into a rose-colored Christian bubble. We must develop strong constitutional and civil arguments for the defense of religious freedom, for the sake of our children, our families and our communities. The Apostle Paul made free use of his Roman passport, even forcing city officials in Philippi to apologize publicly for the illegal arrest and beating of Paul and Silas. We Christians today have wonderful organizations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, which are standing up in our courtrooms defending the constitutional rights of Christians. We must pray for them and support them and others like them, such as Christian Concern in the UK.
Second, we must show our culture, beginning with our friends and neighbors, that the spirit behind the Equality Act is just as religious as the Christianity it rejects. It represents the binary-denying Oneism that will not tolerate the Bible’s Twoist distinctions. The philosophy that upholds the Equality act affirms with great faith and no logical proof that human beings can create their own definition of marriage and their own sexual identity purely from their own thoughts as “free beings.” Where do they get such ability to think, to enjoy life, to make hypotheses? Why should we believe their ideas over against anyone else’s? Their view of sexuality has actually been the view of pagan religion throughout history. (See my article Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal.) There is nothing new under the sun, and everything is religious.
Third, we must do two things at once: ask God to make us courageous enough to accept whatever persecution comes our way. It should never take us by surprise, since Christ promised us that we, like our Master, will suffer. When Paul was converted, he was not only given a mandate to go to the Gentiles; he was told “how much he would suffer” for the sake of Christ. We must stand against an increasingly hostile culture. Yet we also take our stand while preaching the gospel of the Creator who became flesh to take on himself the sins of the world. This gracious God alone can make sense of life. Only he loves his rebellious creatures enough to die for them in the person of his Son. Only as we submit to God’s creational laws and receive his act of gracious salvation will we one day enjoy a life in which evil is defeated and we will live, perfected and delighted, in the company of the personal God, Father, Son and Spirit, in a transformed heaven and earth.
[i]Michael Haverluck, “Religious rights must bow to LGBT,” GOPUSA (April 5, 2019).
[ii]https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/equality-act-anti-christian/.
[iii]Greg Bluestein, “Abrams to be grand marshal in Atlanta Pride Parade,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution(6/7/19).
[iv] https://www.advocate.com/politics/2019/3/07/equality-act-will-be-introduced-next-week-nancy-pelosi-says.
[v]https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-equality-act.
[vi]Haverluck, “Religious rights must bow.”
June 19, 2019 by Dr. Peter Jones
Progressives are constantly seeking ways to silence Bible-believing Christians. Their most recent is “The Equality Act,” which was passed by Congress with the help of eight Republican congressmen. According to James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, this Act will “spell disaster for Americans…[for it] is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to finish off religious liberty in America once and for all,… and places Christians who believe in traditional marriage at grave legal and civil jeopardy.”[i]
If it is passed by the Senate, the Equality Act will amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by adding to the categories protected by anti-discrimination laws “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI). This new social category of LGBTQ rights would join categories such as race and religion, under the assumption that one’s subjectively defined sexual identity is as fundamental and as unchangeable as racial identity.
Such a law would ban sex discrimination in public accommodations, which are redefined to include retailers, banks, transportation, jury service, children’s education, Christian colleges and universities, federal programs, and credit and health care services. The religious component is staggering. It includes the proviso that no one may use the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to maintain religious and theological convictions that might keep them from coming into conformity with the Equality Act in any aspect of their interaction in public life. The RFRA was signed into law by President Clinton on November 16, 1993, to “ensure that interests in religious freedom are protected” by law.
How culture moves! Andrew T. Walker, senior fellow in Christian ethics at the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, calls the Equality Act “the most invasive threat to religious liberty ever proposed in America…. Its sweeping effects on religious liberty, free speech, and freedom of conscience would be both historic and also chilling.”[ii] If it passes, America will never be the same. We were assured many years ago that homosexuals merely wanted the freedom to follow their own desires, but the pressure intends to make Christians the shunned minority.
By excluding any religious consideration of sexual morality, the federal Equality Act imposes on an entire culture the unhealthy lifestyle of homosexual and transgender sexuality.
We must not be fooled. The term “Equality Act” is a clever use of language. Pro-gay politician Stacey Abrams is the grand marshal of the 2019 Atlanta Pride Parade. She is a master of clever language. Abrams states about the conservative governor who beat her in the last election: “We have an administration that is making life difficult for families wishing to adopt and patriots wishing to serve…and we have a man in Georgia’s governor’s mansion who still wants to sign discrimination into law.”[iii] Who wants to be in favor of discrimination? No one, of course. But Abrams is manipulating language. Everyone admires families who adopt and we all admire our patriotic military heroes. But can same-sex parents really give children a firm start in life with the complete absence of either a mother or a father? Does the presence of transgender and homosexual soldiers create no problems at all in the cohesion of a unit? Though we all want to avoid discrimination, good laws always discriminate against unlawful actions and, by necessity, against those who take part in such actions.
Could such a horrendous bill possibly pass the Senate? Nancy Pelosi’s prediction for the House has already come true: “we most certainly will pass it overwhelmingly in the House.”[iv] She did, with the help of 8 Republicans! Will the Senate stand firm? The Left has for some time eliminated any reference to God when taking political oaths and in their deepening promotion of abortion at any stage in pregnancy, they have eliminated any idea of a divine source of life. Startling as it may be, deceitful language has won the day among many witless and culturally naïve citizens, including, apparently, some House Republicans! According to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) “nationally, support for a bill like the Equality Act topped 70%, which includes a majority of Democrats,” along with many Republicans, and Independents. “In addition, there is strong business support for non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people.….160 major companies with operations in all 50 states.”[v]
Just what can we expect?
- Christian adoption agencies who refuse to send children to same-sex homes will be shut down.
- Christian colleges will be obliged to accept LGBTQ students and provide them with their desired dormitory arrangements, otherwise government funds will be refused and the schools’ degrees and diplomas will not be accepted.
- Christian businesses will be closed down.
- Christian doctors will be fired from their posts in conforming hospitals.
- Christian school teachers will be forced to comply with imposed curriculum and gender pronoun rules which are an attack not only on the English language, but on the biblical sexual binary.
The Equality Act seeks to transform American culture by eliminating the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution and by giving the LGBTQ community a free pass to control citizens’ lives with no concern for their earnestly held religious beliefs. Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel believes that the bill is nothing less than “a Trojan Horse used by the LGBT community to force acceptance of its agenda on society…This bill pushes the LGBT agenda on all people, and targets Christianity in every area of life–including the church.”[vi]
What must Christians do?
First, we must not take this eventuality lightly. We cannot retreat into a rose-colored Christian bubble. We must develop strong constitutional and civil arguments for the defense of religious freedom, for the sake of our children, our families and our communities. The Apostle Paul made free use of his Roman passport, even forcing city officials in Philippi to apologize publicly for the illegal arrest and beating of Paul and Silas. We Christians today have wonderful organizations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, which are standing up in our courtrooms defending the constitutional rights of Christians. We must pray for them and support them and others like them, such as Christian Concern in the UK.
Second, we must show our culture, beginning with our friends and neighbors, that the spirit behind the Equality Act is just as religious as the Christianity it rejects. It represents the binary-denying Oneism that will not tolerate the Bible’s Twoist distinctions. The philosophy that upholds the Equality act affirms with great faith and no logical proof that human beings can create their own definition of marriage and their own sexual identity purely from their own thoughts as “free beings.” Where do they get such ability to think, to enjoy life, to make hypotheses? Why should we believe their ideas over against anyone else’s? Their view of sexuality has actually been the view of pagan religion throughout history. (See my article Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal.) There is nothing new under the sun, and everything is religious.
Third, we must do two things at once: ask God to make us courageous enough to accept whatever persecution comes our way. It should never take us by surprise, since Christ promised us that we, like our Master, will suffer. When Paul was converted, he was not only given a mandate to go to the Gentiles; he was told “how much he would suffer” for the sake of Christ. We must stand against an increasingly hostile culture. Yet we also take our stand while preaching the gospel of the Creator who became flesh to take on himself the sins of the world. This gracious God alone can make sense of life. Only he loves his rebellious creatures enough to die for them in the person of his Son. Only as we submit to God’s creational laws and receive his act of gracious salvation will we one day enjoy a life in which evil is defeated and we will live, perfected and delighted, in the company of the personal God, Father, Son and Spirit, in a transformed heaven and earth.
[i]Michael Haverluck, “Religious rights must bow to LGBT,” GOPUSA (April 5, 2019).
[ii]https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/equality-act-anti-christian/.
[iii]Greg Bluestein, “Abrams to be grand marshal in Atlanta Pride Parade,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution(6/7/19).
[iv] https://www.advocate.com/politics/2019/3/07/equality-act-will-be-introduced-next-week-nancy-pelosi-says.
[v]https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-equality-act.
[vi]Haverluck, “Religious rights must bow.”
Cultural and Theological Stockholm Syndrome
May 6, 2019 by Joseph E. Torres
Stockholm Syndrome can be defined as the “psychological response wherein a captive begins to identify closely with his or her captors, as well as with their agenda and demands.”[1] Much of the compromise we observe in orthodoxy are a result of what I call cultural and theological Stockholm Syndrome. Contemporary unbelieving culture is our captor. It tells us day in and day out: “Deny your cross, indulge yourself, follow me!” Modern Oneism takes on both spiritual and secular dress to disguise its true allegiance and uses mockery and ostracism to manipulate vulnerable Christians. Finally, Christians buckle, tired of being labeled intolerant, bigoted and closeminded. They are dismissed because they refuse to attempt a definitive explanation of true mystery, yet are smeared as arrogant when they speak with clarity God’s answers to the fundamental questions our culture raises.
Social media has increased the brainwashing efficiency that brings Christians to their knees before the new (really quite old) gods of our time. A simple # plus a “slanderous label” succeeds in humiliating them not only in their own small social group but in the eyes of thousands of people both locally and around the globe. Within minutes, they are under a lasting cloud of public scorn.
Theologically, Christians are told that the Bible is unreliable, outdated, and morally backward. “Christian” scholars denying the complete truthfulness of Scripture concerning, for example, the historicity of Adam. Popular Christian speakers question the reality of hell; the necessity of faith in Jesus for salvation; or the very doctrine of the atonement won for them by Christ’s death or the righteousness won for them by his perfect life.
Putting up with these constant criticisms is hard work and for some, overwhelming. What is needed, we will be told, is “balance,” the embrace of positions that blur the differences between biblical teaching and social acceptability. In this way, Christians can believe that Jesus died on the cross for their sins, but in numerous ways act and think in the same ways as non-Christians. Christians should see “peace” on issues related to the culture wars, and sometimes that looks like standing against historic Christianity, and with non-Christians, on matters of ethical and social significance.
With each small compromise we drift further from biblical reasoning, and ultimately faithfulness. But as D. A. Carson notes, spiritual and worldview drifts are never toward growth and biblical fidelity. He says,
People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated. [2]
James reminds us that “friendship with the world is enmity toward God” (Js. 4:4). Commentating on this verse, biblical scholar Douglas Moo comments,
God will brook no rival, and when believers behave in a way characteristic of the world, they demonstrate that, at that point, their allegiance is to the world rather than to God. By drawing out the ultimate consequences of worldly behaviour in this way, James seeks to prick the consciences of his readers and to stimulate their repentance.[3]
James’ language of infidelity should shock us and grab our attention. Again, Moo is instructive:
The striking and forceful application of the Old Testament imagery of God as the spouse of his people is the key to understanding this verse. It explains the seriousness of any flirtation with the world by bringing to mind the jealousy of the Lord, which demands a total, unreserved, unwavering allegiance from the people with whom he has joined himself.[4]
Cultural and theological Stockholm syndrome is, in biblical terms, “friendship with the world” (Js. 4:4). We must remain vigilant to remain faithful to our redeeming, ransoming, and returning king. Like King David, we must express our love and loyalty for God in the celebration, joy, and privilege of receiving and obeying his word (see Psalm 119), regardless of how “out-of-step” this makes us with our culture of self-absorption. If you are beginning to lose the will to resist, ask the Lord to awaken you from your slumbers and rescue you from the grip of your seductive captor.
[1] Entry on “Stockholm syndrome,” found at https://www.britannica.com/science/Stockholm-syndrome
[2] D. A. Carson, For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word, vol. 2 (Wheaton: Crossway, 1999), 23
[3] Douglas J. Moo, James. TNTC (Downers Grove, IVP, 2015), 183.
[4] Ibid
May 6, 2019 by Joseph E. Torres
Stockholm Syndrome can be defined as the “psychological response wherein a captive begins to identify closely with his or her captors, as well as with their agenda and demands.”[1] Much of the compromise we observe in orthodoxy are a result of what I call cultural and theological Stockholm Syndrome. Contemporary unbelieving culture is our captor. It tells us day in and day out: “Deny your cross, indulge yourself, follow me!” Modern Oneism takes on both spiritual and secular dress to disguise its true allegiance and uses mockery and ostracism to manipulate vulnerable Christians. Finally, Christians buckle, tired of being labeled intolerant, bigoted and closeminded. They are dismissed because they refuse to attempt a definitive explanation of true mystery, yet are smeared as arrogant when they speak with clarity God’s answers to the fundamental questions our culture raises.
Social media has increased the brainwashing efficiency that brings Christians to their knees before the new (really quite old) gods of our time. A simple # plus a “slanderous label” succeeds in humiliating them not only in their own small social group but in the eyes of thousands of people both locally and around the globe. Within minutes, they are under a lasting cloud of public scorn.
Theologically, Christians are told that the Bible is unreliable, outdated, and morally backward. “Christian” scholars denying the complete truthfulness of Scripture concerning, for example, the historicity of Adam. Popular Christian speakers question the reality of hell; the necessity of faith in Jesus for salvation; or the very doctrine of the atonement won for them by Christ’s death or the righteousness won for them by his perfect life.
Putting up with these constant criticisms is hard work and for some, overwhelming. What is needed, we will be told, is “balance,” the embrace of positions that blur the differences between biblical teaching and social acceptability. In this way, Christians can believe that Jesus died on the cross for their sins, but in numerous ways act and think in the same ways as non-Christians. Christians should see “peace” on issues related to the culture wars, and sometimes that looks like standing against historic Christianity, and with non-Christians, on matters of ethical and social significance.
With each small compromise we drift further from biblical reasoning, and ultimately faithfulness. But as D. A. Carson notes, spiritual and worldview drifts are never toward growth and biblical fidelity. He says,
People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated. [2]
James reminds us that “friendship with the world is enmity toward God” (Js. 4:4). Commentating on this verse, biblical scholar Douglas Moo comments,
God will brook no rival, and when believers behave in a way characteristic of the world, they demonstrate that, at that point, their allegiance is to the world rather than to God. By drawing out the ultimate consequences of worldly behaviour in this way, James seeks to prick the consciences of his readers and to stimulate their repentance.[3]
James’ language of infidelity should shock us and grab our attention. Again, Moo is instructive:
The striking and forceful application of the Old Testament imagery of God as the spouse of his people is the key to understanding this verse. It explains the seriousness of any flirtation with the world by bringing to mind the jealousy of the Lord, which demands a total, unreserved, unwavering allegiance from the people with whom he has joined himself.[4]
Cultural and theological Stockholm syndrome is, in biblical terms, “friendship with the world” (Js. 4:4). We must remain vigilant to remain faithful to our redeeming, ransoming, and returning king. Like King David, we must express our love and loyalty for God in the celebration, joy, and privilege of receiving and obeying his word (see Psalm 119), regardless of how “out-of-step” this makes us with our culture of self-absorption. If you are beginning to lose the will to resist, ask the Lord to awaken you from your slumbers and rescue you from the grip of your seductive captor.
[1] Entry on “Stockholm syndrome,” found at https://www.britannica.com/science/Stockholm-syndrome
[2] D. A. Carson, For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word, vol. 2 (Wheaton: Crossway, 1999), 23
[3] Douglas J. Moo, James. TNTC (Downers Grove, IVP, 2015), 183.
[4] Ibid
Is Marxism All that Bad?
May 3, 2019 by Dr. Peter Jones
I have long vowed not to employ simplistic theological and spiritual categories in debates over politics, since there are genuine Christians in each political party. But as some politicians lunge to wild extremes, Christians need to pause long enough to understand the larger picture. Ultimately, politics starts with worldview. Do we need to be “woke” and if so, to what? Is the new vision valid and valuable?
Christians are called by God to be sensitive to injustice, generous with those in need and eager to see each human being, made in God’s image, receive respect and compassion. In the early church, believers were so dedicated to loving one another that they eagerly distributed their goods and funds to those in need. Isn’t such a system better than greedy capitalism, in which billionaires find tax loopholes and wealthy families deprive worthy students of a place in college by paying off a sports coach on the take?
In light of unfair practices such as these, many voting citizens are considering the possible benefits of a socialist or semi-Marxist cultural structure. Some contend that Marx, in his hostility to Christianity, was only attacking the wealthy Christians of his day, not criticizing true Christianity’s concern for the poor. Under proper circumstances, can religion not sit down at the table with some kind of socialist or Marxist economic theory? Can we not mitigate the worst aspects of capitalism while avoiding the worst effects of old-style Marxism? Such equitable, moderate terminology is attractive. Perhaps we could create a Neo-Marxism—a more humane variant of its atheistic forebear.
In such a discussion, we must first understand the core tenets of the “old-style” Marxism. What did Marx believe? What did he advocate? Marx was a thorough-going materialist who hated religion with an unrelenting passion because he considered it a huge barrier to creating a “just” socialist society. In his book Marxism and Religion Marxist scholar David McLellan says that “for Marx religion is metaphysically and sociologically misguided” and that “its disappearance is the necessary pre-condition for any radical amelioration of social conditions.”[1] For Marx, God only exists in man’s imagination as a projection of himself. If Marx is right about that, then we cannot derive our dignity from being made in God’s image, because there is no God. If Marx is right, then justice is defined and enforced by whichever (sinful) human bureaucrats hold the power. In history, Marxism has never worked out well. Old-style Marxism included the destruction of the family and the practice of abortion, two hauntingly familiar ideals prevalent in our own culture, which aspires to redefine the family and rationalize infanticide. Marxism is pure secular Oneism, in which the only reality is selfish humanity without any transcendent laws to reign in evil. If selfishness is not curtailed, those in power will freely impose their will on others. Needless to say, today’s neo-Marxists realize that it would be political suicide to build a platform on an openly anti-Christian agenda—though those who favor infanticide are getting close!
In every case where Marxism has been tried, the cultural product looked nothing like the voluntary generosity described in the book of Acts. Instead, without the protection afforded by the divine laws of God, countless millions were slaughtered in the name of social justice.
We need a little historical overview. In the 1960s prominent American theorists of socialism and community organizing “devised a plan to provoke chaos by deliberately overwhelming governmental systems…to the point of collapse, paving the way for state intervention” in favor of a “collectivist system.”[2] Frances Fox Piven, with her colleague, Andrew Cloward were members of Chicago’s “socialist” New Party, which closely followed the playbook of neo-Marxist, Saul Alinsky, who deliberately avoided the term Marxism and was an expert in linguistic deception.[3] David Horowitz, once a revolutionary Marxist himself, observes that the New Left had learned the “technique of stealth,” following the influential teachings of Alinsky. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. So in what way is this duck fundamentally and theologically anti-Christian?
The preferred term these days is Neo-Marxism, and while even this term is not used in political circles, it now defines a more humane variant of its atheistic forebear. Actually this version of Marxism, sometimes called “cultural Marxism,” is even more radical than the old Marxism. It has to go beyond the anti-capitalist liberation of the worker because the free market eventually took care of the worker’s economic needs. Neo-Marxism brings a full-orbed Marxist cosmology—a complete worldview seeking to liberate from any creational norms not just the worker’s economic situation but the worker’s psyche and his or her sexual fantasies. The system has emerged as a wholesale program of humanly-generated subjective “identity politics,”[4] severely opposing the dominant oppressors. The vision is broad:
Our concept of socialism is not limited to restructuring work and economic activity. It embraces altering the full range of social, cultural, political and familial structures and power relations…. The socialism we build must address all aspects of power, all of the institutional forces that affect our lives.”[5]
The new Marxism seeks to transform more than the working conditions of the economically disenfranchised; more than the needs of the poor. It’s goal is to liberate the human being from the chains of God’s created cosmic structures. Contemporary progressive American socialists and under-the radar Marxists have the political and cultural wind in their sails. “We are the Underminers, and this is our time,” declare the radicals who are working to remake America into a new society.[6] Here is the important definition of their immediate goals: They do not want to ameliorate Western culture. On the contrary, they want to unmake it, for, as they say, “to undermine something is to weaken its very foundation in order to bring about its eventual collapse.”[7] There is hardly a better way of explaining the violent confrontation between the Left and the Right.
How close to real power are neo-Marxist socialists?The programmatic book on this new movement is Imagine Living in a Socialist USA,[8] hailed appropriately by the author of Marxism in the United States, Paul Buhle,[9] as “the best, most insightful, and most lively work on socialism to appear in a long time.”[10] Imagine Living states clearly that “socialism” is a social agenda of radical egalitarianism or sameness to create the new world of redemptive Marxist fantasy.[11] In other words, caring for the down-trodden is a pretext. The real goal is the radical religious program of the Oneist lie which seeks to wipe God out of the cultural memory.
In the 1920s a group of Marxist intellectuals in Germany, affiliated with the University of Frankfurt set up the “Frankfurt School,” or the Institute for Social Research. When Hitler came to power, he sought to destroy communism and the Institute was closed down. Most of its participants regrouped in New York, under a new Institute affiliated with Columbia University. Most notable was Herbert Marcuse [whom I heard lecture at Princeton], who toured American college campuses in the 1960s with his Neo-Marxist message as expressed in his Eros and Civilization. It is now well-documented that Marxist ideas dominate the teaching on current university campuses,[12] where conservative speech is often banned, as it is on many news sites, magazines and internet sites. President Barack Obama began his presidency by stating “we are five days away from fundamentally changing America.”
What did he mean? Though no one pressed him for an explanation of the change he hoped to bring, we are fair in considering the influences he had in is pre-Presidential days. As a young man, Obama was deeply influenced by a committed Marxist, Frank Marshall Davis. This is the “Frank” in Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father who was a member off the Chicago Communist Party and who never deviated from the Party Line. Historian Paul Kengor states: “No other person can claim the title of Obama’s mentor… Frank is a lasting, permanent influence, an integral part of Obama’s sojourn.”[13] Another Marxist, Bill Ayers, ex-member of the Weathermen, was a friend of Obama in Chicago when he was put forward as a presidential nominee.
Making such suggestions may seem exaggerated. After all, we all should have friends who don’t completely agree with us, right? However, Obama, when elected, named a number of deeply committed Marxists to his team. Several of these continue to influence the political world.
John Brennen, who was named by Obama as head of the CIA was once a member of the Communist party. Valerie Jarrett, the powerful overseer of Obama’s White House, came from a family associated with Chicago’s Communist Party.[14] She, in turn, ensured a post for self-identified communist revolutionary Van Jones as the Obama administration’s green jobs czar in March 2009.[15] David Axelrod, a consequential figure in the rise of Barack Obama, was a “red diaper baby,” raised by a Communist to achieve the goals of the Communist Party.[16] Nellie Ohr wrote a PhD excusing the excesses of Stalin and has always maintained an open mind regarding the Marxist system of government.[17]
Leaders such as the ones I mention here, in addition to many younger, current leaders, do not publicly identify as Marxists. But their histories and their connections are strong indications of their allegiance. One wonders to what extent the political option they call “progressivism,” is really a rejection of the God in whom the nation once trusted. Will they one day, like their Marxist heroes of the past, seek to eliminate the Christian faith from the culture?
What should Christians do? The point of my argument is not to provoke harsh political conflict or visceral hatred. Culturally, we can seek to maintain, for the good of the culture, the legal structures and constitutional freedoms of religion and speech that we are blessed to have in the United States. The Apostle Paul did not hesitate to use his Roman citizenship to avoid unjust mistreatment by the authorities. Today our freedoms are starting to be denied by defining Christian speech as “hate speech.” We must recognize that we now face a massive ideological and spiritual resistance that goes far beyond politics. Christians need to remember that Marxism must be an occasion for evangelism, for this political and ideological Oneist system is a clear example of spiritual and ideological poverty. Individualistic Oneists, who have no real sense of the Twoist idea of “the other,” can never know what real love is. It is the failed idea that humanity can, on its own, be a satisfying explanation for the beauty, intelligence and personal meaningfulness of life on this planet. Marxism cannot explain human evil or propose a divine solution, like the one we Christians know in the death of Christ for sinners. Marxists, who deny the God in whose image they are made, need to hear the gospel of God’s love for sinners.
So in the words of the original disciples addressed to the authorities wishing to silence them, our message of hope must still be:
Let it be known to all of you…that this Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.’
Acts 4:10-12Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. “
Phil. 2:9-11
[1]David McLellan, Marxism and Religion: A Description and Assessment of the Marxist Critique of Christianity (Macmillan Paperback, 1987), quoted in https://www.crisismagazine.com/1989/why-marx-hated-christianity-a-reply-to-leonardo-boff.
[2]See http://www.wnd.com/2014/06/congressmen-obama-using-cloward-piven-maneuver/#Z4kh40OsBFU0JXGA.99.
[3]David Horowitz, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model (Sherman Oaks, CA.: David Horowitz Freedom Center, 2009), 26. Horowitz “The Communist Party Is the Democratic Party,” Breibart News http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/11/12/Horowitz-blasts-left-Heritage.
[4]Leslie Cagan and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, “How Queer Life Might Be Different in a Socialist USA,” chapter 11 in Imagine Living in a Socialist USA, eds. Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith (NY: Harper Perennial, 2014), 100.
[5]Ibid.
[6]http://www.newsociety.com/Contributors/F/Farnish-Keith.
[7]Keith Farnish,Underminers: A Guide to Subverting the Machine (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2013), “Introduction.”
[8]Goldin, Smith and Smith, Imagine Living in a Socialist USA.
[9]Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left (University of Michigan: Verso; 1991).
[10]Buhle, quoted on the cover of Imagine Living in a Socialist USA.
[11]Paul Buhle, “Marxism, the United States, and the Twentieth-Century,” Monthly Review, 61 (May 2009), optimistically states: “The realities of a collapsing ecosystem are as fearful as the threats of nuclear war in the first decade of Monthly Review’s existence. Still, there are lots of prospects in front of us and around the corner. Marxism, always unfinished, is going to be a big help in figuring out what they are and what to do about them.”
[12]Toby Young, “The Neo-Marxist Takeover of our Universities,” https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/the-neo-marxist-takeover-of-our-universities.
[13]Paul Kengor, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (July 2012, Simon & Schuster Audio/Mercury Ink).
[14]ValerieJarrett, Discover the Networks https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/valerie-jarrett/.
[15]Ibid.
[16]https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/02/david_axelrod_busted_on_lie_about_his_fathers_communist_party_membership.html.
[17]https://spectator.org/nellie-ohr-woman-in-the-middle.
May 3, 2019 by Dr. Peter Jones
I have long vowed not to employ simplistic theological and spiritual categories in debates over politics, since there are genuine Christians in each political party. But as some politicians lunge to wild extremes, Christians need to pause long enough to understand the larger picture. Ultimately, politics starts with worldview. Do we need to be “woke” and if so, to what? Is the new vision valid and valuable?
Christians are called by God to be sensitive to injustice, generous with those in need and eager to see each human being, made in God’s image, receive respect and compassion. In the early church, believers were so dedicated to loving one another that they eagerly distributed their goods and funds to those in need. Isn’t such a system better than greedy capitalism, in which billionaires find tax loopholes and wealthy families deprive worthy students of a place in college by paying off a sports coach on the take?
In light of unfair practices such as these, many voting citizens are considering the possible benefits of a socialist or semi-Marxist cultural structure. Some contend that Marx, in his hostility to Christianity, was only attacking the wealthy Christians of his day, not criticizing true Christianity’s concern for the poor. Under proper circumstances, can religion not sit down at the table with some kind of socialist or Marxist economic theory? Can we not mitigate the worst aspects of capitalism while avoiding the worst effects of old-style Marxism? Such equitable, moderate terminology is attractive. Perhaps we could create a Neo-Marxism—a more humane variant of its atheistic forebear.
In such a discussion, we must first understand the core tenets of the “old-style” Marxism. What did Marx believe? What did he advocate? Marx was a thorough-going materialist who hated religion with an unrelenting passion because he considered it a huge barrier to creating a “just” socialist society. In his book Marxism and Religion Marxist scholar David McLellan says that “for Marx religion is metaphysically and sociologically misguided” and that “its disappearance is the necessary pre-condition for any radical amelioration of social conditions.”[1] For Marx, God only exists in man’s imagination as a projection of himself. If Marx is right about that, then we cannot derive our dignity from being made in God’s image, because there is no God. If Marx is right, then justice is defined and enforced by whichever (sinful) human bureaucrats hold the power. In history, Marxism has never worked out well. Old-style Marxism included the destruction of the family and the practice of abortion, two hauntingly familiar ideals prevalent in our own culture, which aspires to redefine the family and rationalize infanticide. Marxism is pure secular Oneism, in which the only reality is selfish humanity without any transcendent laws to reign in evil. If selfishness is not curtailed, those in power will freely impose their will on others. Needless to say, today’s neo-Marxists realize that it would be political suicide to build a platform on an openly anti-Christian agenda—though those who favor infanticide are getting close!
In every case where Marxism has been tried, the cultural product looked nothing like the voluntary generosity described in the book of Acts. Instead, without the protection afforded by the divine laws of God, countless millions were slaughtered in the name of social justice.
We need a little historical overview. In the 1960s prominent American theorists of socialism and community organizing “devised a plan to provoke chaos by deliberately overwhelming governmental systems…to the point of collapse, paving the way for state intervention” in favor of a “collectivist system.”[2] Frances Fox Piven, with her colleague, Andrew Cloward were members of Chicago’s “socialist” New Party, which closely followed the playbook of neo-Marxist, Saul Alinsky, who deliberately avoided the term Marxism and was an expert in linguistic deception.[3] David Horowitz, once a revolutionary Marxist himself, observes that the New Left had learned the “technique of stealth,” following the influential teachings of Alinsky. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. So in what way is this duck fundamentally and theologically anti-Christian?
The preferred term these days is Neo-Marxism, and while even this term is not used in political circles, it now defines a more humane variant of its atheistic forebear. Actually this version of Marxism, sometimes called “cultural Marxism,” is even more radical than the old Marxism. It has to go beyond the anti-capitalist liberation of the worker because the free market eventually took care of the worker’s economic needs. Neo-Marxism brings a full-orbed Marxist cosmology—a complete worldview seeking to liberate from any creational norms not just the worker’s economic situation but the worker’s psyche and his or her sexual fantasies. The system has emerged as a wholesale program of humanly-generated subjective “identity politics,”[4] severely opposing the dominant oppressors. The vision is broad:
Our concept of socialism is not limited to restructuring work and economic activity. It embraces altering the full range of social, cultural, political and familial structures and power relations…. The socialism we build must address all aspects of power, all of the institutional forces that affect our lives.”[5]
The new Marxism seeks to transform more than the working conditions of the economically disenfranchised; more than the needs of the poor. It’s goal is to liberate the human being from the chains of God’s created cosmic structures. Contemporary progressive American socialists and under-the radar Marxists have the political and cultural wind in their sails. “We are the Underminers, and this is our time,” declare the radicals who are working to remake America into a new society.[6] Here is the important definition of their immediate goals: They do not want to ameliorate Western culture. On the contrary, they want to unmake it, for, as they say, “to undermine something is to weaken its very foundation in order to bring about its eventual collapse.”[7] There is hardly a better way of explaining the violent confrontation between the Left and the Right.
How close to real power are neo-Marxist socialists?The programmatic book on this new movement is Imagine Living in a Socialist USA,[8] hailed appropriately by the author of Marxism in the United States, Paul Buhle,[9] as “the best, most insightful, and most lively work on socialism to appear in a long time.”[10] Imagine Living states clearly that “socialism” is a social agenda of radical egalitarianism or sameness to create the new world of redemptive Marxist fantasy.[11] In other words, caring for the down-trodden is a pretext. The real goal is the radical religious program of the Oneist lie which seeks to wipe God out of the cultural memory.
In the 1920s a group of Marxist intellectuals in Germany, affiliated with the University of Frankfurt set up the “Frankfurt School,” or the Institute for Social Research. When Hitler came to power, he sought to destroy communism and the Institute was closed down. Most of its participants regrouped in New York, under a new Institute affiliated with Columbia University. Most notable was Herbert Marcuse [whom I heard lecture at Princeton], who toured American college campuses in the 1960s with his Neo-Marxist message as expressed in his Eros and Civilization. It is now well-documented that Marxist ideas dominate the teaching on current university campuses,[12] where conservative speech is often banned, as it is on many news sites, magazines and internet sites. President Barack Obama began his presidency by stating “we are five days away from fundamentally changing America.”
What did he mean? Though no one pressed him for an explanation of the change he hoped to bring, we are fair in considering the influences he had in is pre-Presidential days. As a young man, Obama was deeply influenced by a committed Marxist, Frank Marshall Davis. This is the “Frank” in Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father who was a member off the Chicago Communist Party and who never deviated from the Party Line. Historian Paul Kengor states: “No other person can claim the title of Obama’s mentor… Frank is a lasting, permanent influence, an integral part of Obama’s sojourn.”[13] Another Marxist, Bill Ayers, ex-member of the Weathermen, was a friend of Obama in Chicago when he was put forward as a presidential nominee.
Making such suggestions may seem exaggerated. After all, we all should have friends who don’t completely agree with us, right? However, Obama, when elected, named a number of deeply committed Marxists to his team. Several of these continue to influence the political world.
John Brennen, who was named by Obama as head of the CIA was once a member of the Communist party. Valerie Jarrett, the powerful overseer of Obama’s White House, came from a family associated with Chicago’s Communist Party.[14] She, in turn, ensured a post for self-identified communist revolutionary Van Jones as the Obama administration’s green jobs czar in March 2009.[15] David Axelrod, a consequential figure in the rise of Barack Obama, was a “red diaper baby,” raised by a Communist to achieve the goals of the Communist Party.[16] Nellie Ohr wrote a PhD excusing the excesses of Stalin and has always maintained an open mind regarding the Marxist system of government.[17]
Leaders such as the ones I mention here, in addition to many younger, current leaders, do not publicly identify as Marxists. But their histories and their connections are strong indications of their allegiance. One wonders to what extent the political option they call “progressivism,” is really a rejection of the God in whom the nation once trusted. Will they one day, like their Marxist heroes of the past, seek to eliminate the Christian faith from the culture?
What should Christians do? The point of my argument is not to provoke harsh political conflict or visceral hatred. Culturally, we can seek to maintain, for the good of the culture, the legal structures and constitutional freedoms of religion and speech that we are blessed to have in the United States. The Apostle Paul did not hesitate to use his Roman citizenship to avoid unjust mistreatment by the authorities. Today our freedoms are starting to be denied by defining Christian speech as “hate speech.” We must recognize that we now face a massive ideological and spiritual resistance that goes far beyond politics. Christians need to remember that Marxism must be an occasion for evangelism, for this political and ideological Oneist system is a clear example of spiritual and ideological poverty. Individualistic Oneists, who have no real sense of the Twoist idea of “the other,” can never know what real love is. It is the failed idea that humanity can, on its own, be a satisfying explanation for the beauty, intelligence and personal meaningfulness of life on this planet. Marxism cannot explain human evil or propose a divine solution, like the one we Christians know in the death of Christ for sinners. Marxists, who deny the God in whose image they are made, need to hear the gospel of God’s love for sinners.
So in the words of the original disciples addressed to the authorities wishing to silence them, our message of hope must still be:
Let it be known to all of you…that this Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.’
Acts 4:10-12Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. “
Phil. 2:9-11
[1]David McLellan, Marxism and Religion: A Description and Assessment of the Marxist Critique of Christianity (Macmillan Paperback, 1987), quoted in https://www.crisismagazine.com/1989/why-marx-hated-christianity-a-reply-to-leonardo-boff.
[2]See http://www.wnd.com/2014/06/congressmen-obama-using-cloward-piven-maneuver/#Z4kh40OsBFU0JXGA.99.
[3]David Horowitz, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model (Sherman Oaks, CA.: David Horowitz Freedom Center, 2009), 26. Horowitz “The Communist Party Is the Democratic Party,” Breibart News http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/11/12/Horowitz-blasts-left-Heritage.
[4]Leslie Cagan and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, “How Queer Life Might Be Different in a Socialist USA,” chapter 11 in Imagine Living in a Socialist USA, eds. Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith (NY: Harper Perennial, 2014), 100.
[5]Ibid.
[6]http://www.newsociety.com/Contributors/F/Farnish-Keith.
[7]Keith Farnish,Underminers: A Guide to Subverting the Machine (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2013), “Introduction.”
[8]Goldin, Smith and Smith, Imagine Living in a Socialist USA.
[9]Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left (University of Michigan: Verso; 1991).
[10]Buhle, quoted on the cover of Imagine Living in a Socialist USA.
[11]Paul Buhle, “Marxism, the United States, and the Twentieth-Century,” Monthly Review, 61 (May 2009), optimistically states: “The realities of a collapsing ecosystem are as fearful as the threats of nuclear war in the first decade of Monthly Review’s existence. Still, there are lots of prospects in front of us and around the corner. Marxism, always unfinished, is going to be a big help in figuring out what they are and what to do about them.”
[12]Toby Young, “The Neo-Marxist Takeover of our Universities,” https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/the-neo-marxist-takeover-of-our-universities.
[13]Paul Kengor, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (July 2012, Simon & Schuster Audio/Mercury Ink).
[14]ValerieJarrett, Discover the Networks https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/valerie-jarrett/.
[15]Ibid.
[16]https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/02/david_axelrod_busted_on_lie_about_his_fathers_communist_party_membership.html.
[17]https://spectator.org/nellie-ohr-woman-in-the-middle.
A House Divided
March 15, 2019 by Dr. Peter Jones
Respected Jewish commentator Dennis Prager has just made a stunningly bellicose judgment[1]about American culture:
America is currently fighting its second Civil War…There will be unity only when the left vanquishes the right or the right vanquishes the left. Using the First Civil War analogy, American unity was achieved only after the South was vanquished and slavery was abolished.
He notes the current culture’s deep divide in all the important areas of human life. “Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation … [and] seeks to erase America’s Judeo-Christian foundation.” He concludes: “Without any important value held in common, how can there be unity between left and non-left? Obviously, there cannot.” As another author puts it, “we are expected to adapt unquestioningly to bizarre cultural changes like the celebration of ‘gender fluidity,’ abortion, infanticide, 11-year-old drag queens [and the normalization of prostitution]. It is assumed as a given that we must force girls to use ‘non-gender specific’ bathrooms, to reward victimhood, and to demonize ‘toxic masculinity’ and law-abiding citizens. And intense pressure is on us to embrace the destruction of our borders — and to forfeit our right of self-defense.”[2] Well-known Sheriff David Clarke charges progressivism with a constant attempt “to destroy the bedrock institutions of Western culture, such as religion, schools, family, capitalism, businesses, law and order, the Constitution including the First and Second Amendment, and the rule of law.”[3]
Are there other reasons why an intelligent and balanced scholar like Prager would come to such a worrisome conclusion?
Some historians point to ancient Rome as a time when such antagonism was just as sharp as it is today, particularly for Christians, when two different views of the divine caused profound conflict. These same scholars document a return of the spirituality of pagan ancient Rome in “once Christian” Western culture. Among these are: Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010); Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); and Steven D. Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017). Smith, in particular, shows that the opposition between Rome and Christians was due largely to a fundamental religiousdistinction. He states:
The pagan gods were actors…within this world. The God of Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, is ‘the creatorof the world’…who dwells beyond space and time…pagan religion locates the sacred withinthis world…an immanentsacred. Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, reflect a transcendentreligiosity: they place the sacred, ultimately, outsidethe world (Smith, 111–12).
He argues that “paganism served to sacralize the city…this life, and the good things of this life, are the only ones we need to concern ourselves with” (Smith, 114). Smith goes on:
…the full majesty of the gods was deployed in support of the political community and its rulers…religious life served to enlist the subject’s full loyalty…Patriotism and paganism were coextensive.” (Smith, 126).
Roman life and spirituality have returned. In describing the Reagan family’s use of astrology in the White House, Ferdinand Mount states: “Not since the days of the Roman emperors—and never in the history of the United states presidency—has an astrologer played such a significant role in in the national affairs of state” (Mount, 220). Mount goes on to state: “…the ways in which we live our lives corresponds to the way Greeks and Romans lived their lives.” (Mount, 3). A telling article appeared in response to the horrifying legislation passed in Virginia and New York (unknown in the history of the West), which justifies the murder of babies in the birth canal or even on the table, should they have the stamina to survive an attempted abortion. The article is entitled “Infanticide Is the Historical Hallmark of Paganism,”[4]and it carefully shows the prevalence of abortion in pagan cultures. Even the famed Stoic Seneca says that killing a child is the “reasoned” thing to do, if it is “useless” to society. Today, our leading politicians are also proposing another extreme moral position: namely the full “decriminalization of sex work to promote the safety, wellbeing, and health of all people in the sex trades.”[5]
Smith notes that the two fundamentally irreconcilable religious beliefs—the god within or the God above—now face off in an “ongoing contest between two contrasting and enduring religiosities” (Smith, 13): modern progressivism versus classic theism (Smith, 12-14). Progressivism fails to see that essential conflict, since it believes that history cannot go “back to earlier stages” (Smith), 12). Rather, “history [always] moves forward from one phase to another leaving past phases irretrievably behind…from pagan to Christian to secular to post secular” (Smith, 12-14).
Using the terminology of Oneism and Twoism, truthXchangehas sought for nearly a full generation to clarify for our times what the Apostle Paul was saying two thousand years ago in Romans 1:25. Neither truthXchangenor Professor Smith are saying anything new! The Apostle (who grounded his teaching in the clear revelation of the I AM God of the Old Testament) clearly teaches that there are only two possible ways to be spiritual: worship of nature or worship of the Creator of nature.
There are many dangers in Progressivism. Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Pol Pot all claimed to be saviors, chosen by destiny to bring in a new form of earthly utopia. They were full of creative youthful optimism, eager to fight the outlived elders of dying Western civilization. They proposed enormous hope, promising the coup de gracefor liberalism and capitalism. They would replace egoism with altruism and tired democracy with a new world order. They were banner bearers of a holy crusade that would make the world a better place. The whining and crying of impotent old men, they said, is futile. No one can stop the wheel of history, or turn back the clock of time. We need to be on “the right side of history.” To be on the right side of history means to define opposing theories as hate speech, which must be silenced. Progressivism is so right in its sense of progress that it does not even need to be discussed!
This self-absorbed vision fails to see that there is no real religious progress but only and always the constant conflict between worship of the transcendent God and worship of a self-divinizing creation. Paul defines these options as “the Truth” and “the Lie” (Romans 1:25). They cannot be joined in some interfaith mix. The clash between them all around the world, is coming to a head either in persecution, spiritual revival or, ultimately, in the return of Christ.
Smith asks this question: Why would tolerant, sophisticated Romans imprison, torture and kill fellow citizens for being Christians? His answer? “The failure to achieve mutually acceptable terms of co-existence” (Smith, 130–1). For a peaceful, functioning culture in Rome, “all citizens were required to express loyalty to the emperor…who was addressed with the same titles that the Christians used of Jesus” (Smith, 140, quoting Winter, Divine Honours, 277). While the multitude of pagan cults that flocked to Rome could add to their list the divinized Caesar as an additional god, for Christians, this was an act of polytheism and thus a denial of the very nature of the true and only God. Here was culture shock leading to cultural deadlock. Christianity was seen as politically “subversive with respect to the pagan foundations of the pre-Christian Roman state” (Smith, 144–5). Moreover, the Christian affirmation of an all-seeing transcendent Judge undermined the pagan sense of freedom and dignity, and was considered by pagans as “an intolerable curtailment of liberty” due to unreasonable censorious and dogmatic attitudes (Smith, 147–9).
This conflict became a civil war, though only one side took up arms.
Roman authorities, as is well documented, removed Christians from serving in the military or from teaching. Christian believers were imprisoned and sometimes killed. On February 23, AD 303, the Christian church of Nicomedia in Roman Bithynia was utterly destroyed, marking the beginning of a violent Empire-wide repression of Christianity known to future generations as the Great Persecution. This state-sponsored attack would be the most violent, wide-ranging, and longest-lasting effort of the Roman government to wipe out the hated Christian sect. It would also be the last. In a kind of spiritual war, a war of conversion, the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in AD 312.
What if such a war broke out today, as Dennis Prager imagines? For starters, and it is on their agenda, progressives would have to get rid of the Constitution and/or appoint six radical Supreme Court Justices. For Christians the response cannot be the war of the States but the war as conducted by Jesus and Paul. Jesus went to Jerusalem knowing he would be killed but that his death would eventually bring an end to all war. Paul, who knew the dangerous situation in Rome, nonetheless went there to preach the Gospel and convert pagans. While he knew the situation of these godless pagans who rejected their Maker, worshiped idols and engaged in creation-denying sexuality (Romans 1:18–27), he yet states:
I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Rom 1:15–17)
Before the triumphant return of the Lord, the only answer to the history-longreligious war between Oneism and Twoism is for Christians to take to progressives of all kinds the gospel of Jesus who, by his death and resurrection, removes the Lie about God as nature and re-establishes the Truth about God as the loving, redeeming Creator of fallen creatures. This is the deep truth about God that no one may deny, for to him as the Originator of all things belongs the kingdom, the power and the glory for ever.
[1]https://www.dennisprager.com/americas-second-civil-war/
[2]Trump Goes on the Offensive in the Culture War, https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273043/trump-goes-offensive-culture-war-karen-kataline.
[3]The Cult-like Psychology of the Progressive Movement, https://townhall.com/columnists/sheriffdavidclarke(ret)/2019/03/04/the-cultlike-psychosis-of-the-progressive-movement-n2542537.
[4]Infanticide Is the Historical Hallmark of a Pagan Culture, http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/04/without-christianity-we-might-unthinkingly-return-to-the-infanticidal-cultures-of-yore.
[5]Prostitutes Demand Meeting with Kamala Harris, http://www.gopusa.com/?p=65819?omhide=true.
Blessed Hieromonk Seraphim Rose (1934-1982)
Father Seraphim was born into a typical white middle class Protestant family in San Diego in 1934. While growing up, he was the proverbial dutiful child and academic achiever. After high school, however, he began to passionately seek the answer to the question “Why?”–and, not finding it in the society in which he had been raised, he began to rebel. He refused to accept the accepted answers. This was at the very beginning of the modern counterculture, the early 1950’s. Father Seraphim became a student of one of the counterculture’s first pioneers, Alan Watts (whom he realized later was totally pseudo) and became a Buddhist Bohemian in San Francisco. He learned ancient Chinese in order to study the Tao Teh Ching and other ancient Eastern texts in their original language, hoping thereby to tap into the heart of their wisdom. By this time he had wholly rejected the Protestant Christianity of his formative years, which he regarded as worldly, weak, and fake; he mocked its concept of God and that that it “put God in a box.” He Read Nietzsche until the Prophets words began to resonate in his soul with an electric, infernal power.
All this time, he had been seeking the Truth with his mind, but the Truth had eluded him. He fell into a state of despair which he described years later as a living hell. He felt he did not fit in the modern world, even his family, who did not understand him. It was as if he had somehow been born out of place, out of time. He loved to roam under the stars, but he felt that there was nothing our there to take him in–no God, nothing. The Buddhist “nothingness” left him empty, just as it did the founder of the Beat movement, Jack Kerouac; and, like Kerouac, Father Seraphim turned to drink. He would drink wine voraciously and then would pound on the floor, screaming to God to leave him alone. Once while drunk, he raised his fist to heaven from a mountaintop and cursed God, daring Him to damn him to Hell. In his despair, it seemed worth being damned forever by God’s wrath, if only he could empirically know that God exists–rather than remain in a stagnant state of indifference. If God did damn him to hell, at lest then he would, for that blissful instant, feel God’s touch and know for sure He was reachable
“Atheism,” Father Seraphim wrote in later years, “true ‘existential’ atheism, burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God Whose ways are so inexplicable even to the most believing of men, and it has more than once been known to end in a blinding vision of Him Whom the real atheist truly seeks. It is Christ Who works in these souls. The Antichrist is not to be found in the deniers, but in the small affirmers, whose Christ is only on the lips. Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ…”
In searching through various ancient religions and traditions, Father Seraphim once went to visit a Russian Orthodox Church. Later he wrote of his experience.
“For years in my studies I was satisfied with being ‘above all traditions’ but somehow faithful to them… When I visited an Orthodox Church, it was only in order to view another ‘tradition’. However, when I entered an Orthodox Church for the first time (a Russian Church in San Francisco) something happened to me that I had not experienced in any Buddhist or other Eastern temple; something in my heart said this was ‘home,’ that all my search was over. I didn’t really know what this meant, because the service was quite strange to me and in a foreign language. I began to attend Orthodox services more frequently, gradually learning its language and customs… With my exposure to orthodoxy and Orthodox people, a new idea began to enter my awareness: that Truth was not just an abstract idea, sought and known by the mind, but was something personal–even a Person–sought and loved by the heart. And that is how I met Christ.”
On becoming Orthodox Father Seraphim continued to despise modern world and hoped for nothing from it; he wanted only to escape it. He felt no less, if not more, estranged from the Christianity he had been raised in, for while that Christianity was at home in the world, his was radically otherworldly. He had finally found the designation of man’s existence, and it was this: man is meant for another world.
Father Seraphim’s was an ascetic Faith. He wanted a Christianity that emphasized not earthly consolation and beliefs, but rather heavenly redemption through suffering on this earth. No other kind rang true to him who had suffered much. Only a God Who allowed His children to be perfected for heaven through suffering, and Who Himself set the example by coming to a life of suffering–only such a God was capable of drawing the afflicted world to Himself and was worthy to be worshiped by the highest spiritual faculties of man.
In his journal, Father Seraphim wrote: “Let us not, who would be Christians, expect anything else from it than to be crucified. For to be a Christian is to be crucified, in this time and in any time since Christ came for the first time. His life is the example–and warning–to us all. We must be crucified personally, mystically; for through crucifixion is the only path to resurrection. If we would rise with Christ, we must first be humbled with Him–even to the ultimate humiliation, being devoured and spit forth by the uncomprehending world.
“And we must be crucified outwardly, in the eyes of the world; for Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, and the world cannot bear it, even in a single representation of it, even for a single moment. The world can only accept Antichrist, now or at anytime.
“No wonder, then, that it is so hard to be Christian–it is not hard it is impossible. No one can knowingly accept a way of life which, the more truly it is lived, leads more surely to one’s own destruction. And that is way we constantly rebel, try to make life easier, try to be half-Christian, try to make the best of both worlds. We must ultimately choose–our felicity lies in one world or the other, not in both.
“God give is the strength to pursue the path of crucifixion; there is not other way to be Christian.”
Before he had found the truth, Father Seraphim had suffered for the lack of it. Now, having found it, he suffered for the sake of it. He devoted the rest of his life to living that truth, and killing himself to give it to others. Together with a young Russian man, named Gleb Podmosphnesky, he formed a Brotherhood which practiced the “Do it yourself” philosophy. They opened a bookstore in San Francisco and began printing a small magazine called the Orthodox Word by hand on a small letterpress, translating Ancient Christian texts and bringing Orthodox Literature to America. Later, to avoid the emptiness of the city, they moved their printing operation to the wilderness of Northern California, where they began to live like the ancient desert dwellers, of ancient times. There was not running water on their forested mountain, no telephone, no electric lines. They built their buildings themselves out of old lumber taken from pioneer dwellings and hauled water on their backs up the mountain. They lived with deer, rabbits, bear, foxes, squirrels, bats, mountain lions, scorpions, and rattlesnakes.
In 1970 the became monks, thus dying forever to the world. In the wilderness Father Seraphim’s spirit began to soar “The city,” he once said, “is for those who are empty, and it pushes away those who are filled and allows them to thrive.”
Working by candlelight in his tiny cabin, Father Seraphim created a great number of original writings and translations of ancient ascetic texts. In America his writings have so far reached only select circles but in countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain they have had and incalculable impact on human lives. During the communist era, Father Seraphim’s writings were secretly translated into Russian and distributed in the underground press (samizdat) in the form of typewritten manuscripts. By the time the fall of Communist power in 1991, Father Seraphim was known all over Russia. Today his books are on sale everywhere in Russia, including book tables in the Metro (subway) and on the street. The reason that he has made a much greater mark on Russia that on his homeland is because in Russia people knew how to suffer. Father Seraphim’s message of underground Christianity, of suffering and persecution in this world for the sake of truth, touches a responsive chord in people who have already been crucified. In America people would rather hear the “nice” messages of preachers like Rev. Robert Schuler (who, by the way, broadcasts his show in Russia, where people can hardly believe how stupid it is). I met Father Seraphim a year and a half before his death in 1982. Like him, I had been seeking reality through Eastern religions, etc., by seeking to escape pseudo-reality through a Zen-like breakdown of logical thought processes. Finally, reduced to despair, I listened to Sid Barrett’s two schizophrenic-withdrawal, childhood-regression solo albums over and over, until I had memorized all his word salads. One day Father Seraphim came to the campus where I was going to school. He drove up in an old beat up pick-up truck and emerged in his worn out black robe, his long hair, and his exceedingly long grey beard which had become matted. I was the image of absolute poverty. Next thing I remember I was walking with Father Seraphim through the college. Dinner had just ended and students were milling and hanging around the outside cafeteria. Everyone was staring at Father Seraphim, but he walked through them as naturally as if he had been at home. I the middle of a progressive American college, he seemed like someone who had just stepped out of the 4th century Egyptian desert.
Father Seraphim went to a lecture room and delivered a talk called “Signs of the Coming of the End of the World.” He had happened to be sick at the same time and sniffled throughout his lecture. Obviously exhausted, he yet remained clear-headed, cheerful, and ready to answer questions at length. I could see that he was at least as learned and far more wise than any of my professors, and yet he was clearly a man of the wilderness, more at home in the forest than in a classroom.
What struck me most about Father Seraphim was that here was a man who was totally sacrificing himself for God, for the truth. He was not a university Professor receiving a comfortable salary for being a disseminator of knowledge, nor was he a religious leader who hankered after power, influence, or even a bowl of fruit to be placed at his feet, as did the “spiritual masters” who had followings in that area. He was not “into religion” for what could he get out of it; he was not looking for a crutch to “enjoy spiritual life.” He was just a simple monk who sought the Truth above all else. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would die for that Truth, for I could see he was dying for it already.
-Monk Damascene
Father Seraphim was born into a typical white middle class Protestant family in San Diego in 1934. While growing up, he was the proverbial dutiful child and academic achiever. After high school, however, he began to passionately seek the answer to the question “Why?”–and, not finding it in the society in which he had been raised, he began to rebel. He refused to accept the accepted answers. This was at the very beginning of the modern counterculture, the early 1950’s. Father Seraphim became a student of one of the counterculture’s first pioneers, Alan Watts (whom he realized later was totally pseudo) and became a Buddhist Bohemian in San Francisco. He learned ancient Chinese in order to study the Tao Teh Ching and other ancient Eastern texts in their original language, hoping thereby to tap into the heart of their wisdom. By this time he had wholly rejected the Protestant Christianity of his formative years, which he regarded as worldly, weak, and fake; he mocked its concept of God and that that it “put God in a box.” He Read Nietzsche until the Prophets words began to resonate in his soul with an electric, infernal power.
All this time, he had been seeking the Truth with his mind, but the Truth had eluded him. He fell into a state of despair which he described years later as a living hell. He felt he did not fit in the modern world, even his family, who did not understand him. It was as if he had somehow been born out of place, out of time. He loved to roam under the stars, but he felt that there was nothing our there to take him in–no God, nothing. The Buddhist “nothingness” left him empty, just as it did the founder of the Beat movement, Jack Kerouac; and, like Kerouac, Father Seraphim turned to drink. He would drink wine voraciously and then would pound on the floor, screaming to God to leave him alone. Once while drunk, he raised his fist to heaven from a mountaintop and cursed God, daring Him to damn him to Hell. In his despair, it seemed worth being damned forever by God’s wrath, if only he could empirically know that God exists–rather than remain in a stagnant state of indifference. If God did damn him to hell, at lest then he would, for that blissful instant, feel God’s touch and know for sure He was reachable
“Atheism,” Father Seraphim wrote in later years, “true ‘existential’ atheism, burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God Whose ways are so inexplicable even to the most believing of men, and it has more than once been known to end in a blinding vision of Him Whom the real atheist truly seeks. It is Christ Who works in these souls. The Antichrist is not to be found in the deniers, but in the small affirmers, whose Christ is only on the lips. Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ…”
In searching through various ancient religions and traditions, Father Seraphim once went to visit a Russian Orthodox Church. Later he wrote of his experience.
“For years in my studies I was satisfied with being ‘above all traditions’ but somehow faithful to them… When I visited an Orthodox Church, it was only in order to view another ‘tradition’. However, when I entered an Orthodox Church for the first time (a Russian Church in San Francisco) something happened to me that I had not experienced in any Buddhist or other Eastern temple; something in my heart said this was ‘home,’ that all my search was over. I didn’t really know what this meant, because the service was quite strange to me and in a foreign language. I began to attend Orthodox services more frequently, gradually learning its language and customs… With my exposure to orthodoxy and Orthodox people, a new idea began to enter my awareness: that Truth was not just an abstract idea, sought and known by the mind, but was something personal–even a Person–sought and loved by the heart. And that is how I met Christ.”
On becoming Orthodox Father Seraphim continued to despise modern world and hoped for nothing from it; he wanted only to escape it. He felt no less, if not more, estranged from the Christianity he had been raised in, for while that Christianity was at home in the world, his was radically otherworldly. He had finally found the designation of man’s existence, and it was this: man is meant for another world.
Father Seraphim’s was an ascetic Faith. He wanted a Christianity that emphasized not earthly consolation and beliefs, but rather heavenly redemption through suffering on this earth. No other kind rang true to him who had suffered much. Only a God Who allowed His children to be perfected for heaven through suffering, and Who Himself set the example by coming to a life of suffering–only such a God was capable of drawing the afflicted world to Himself and was worthy to be worshiped by the highest spiritual faculties of man.
In his journal, Father Seraphim wrote: “Let us not, who would be Christians, expect anything else from it than to be crucified. For to be a Christian is to be crucified, in this time and in any time since Christ came for the first time. His life is the example–and warning–to us all. We must be crucified personally, mystically; for through crucifixion is the only path to resurrection. If we would rise with Christ, we must first be humbled with Him–even to the ultimate humiliation, being devoured and spit forth by the uncomprehending world.
“And we must be crucified outwardly, in the eyes of the world; for Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, and the world cannot bear it, even in a single representation of it, even for a single moment. The world can only accept Antichrist, now or at anytime.
“No wonder, then, that it is so hard to be Christian–it is not hard it is impossible. No one can knowingly accept a way of life which, the more truly it is lived, leads more surely to one’s own destruction. And that is way we constantly rebel, try to make life easier, try to be half-Christian, try to make the best of both worlds. We must ultimately choose–our felicity lies in one world or the other, not in both.
“God give is the strength to pursue the path of crucifixion; there is not other way to be Christian.”
Before he had found the truth, Father Seraphim had suffered for the lack of it. Now, having found it, he suffered for the sake of it. He devoted the rest of his life to living that truth, and killing himself to give it to others. Together with a young Russian man, named Gleb Podmosphnesky, he formed a Brotherhood which practiced the “Do it yourself” philosophy. They opened a bookstore in San Francisco and began printing a small magazine called the Orthodox Word by hand on a small letterpress, translating Ancient Christian texts and bringing Orthodox Literature to America. Later, to avoid the emptiness of the city, they moved their printing operation to the wilderness of Northern California, where they began to live like the ancient desert dwellers, of ancient times. There was not running water on their forested mountain, no telephone, no electric lines. They built their buildings themselves out of old lumber taken from pioneer dwellings and hauled water on their backs up the mountain. They lived with deer, rabbits, bear, foxes, squirrels, bats, mountain lions, scorpions, and rattlesnakes.
In 1970 the became monks, thus dying forever to the world. In the wilderness Father Seraphim’s spirit began to soar “The city,” he once said, “is for those who are empty, and it pushes away those who are filled and allows them to thrive.”
Working by candlelight in his tiny cabin, Father Seraphim created a great number of original writings and translations of ancient ascetic texts. In America his writings have so far reached only select circles but in countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain they have had and incalculable impact on human lives. During the communist era, Father Seraphim’s writings were secretly translated into Russian and distributed in the underground press (samizdat) in the form of typewritten manuscripts. By the time the fall of Communist power in 1991, Father Seraphim was known all over Russia. Today his books are on sale everywhere in Russia, including book tables in the Metro (subway) and on the street. The reason that he has made a much greater mark on Russia that on his homeland is because in Russia people knew how to suffer. Father Seraphim’s message of underground Christianity, of suffering and persecution in this world for the sake of truth, touches a responsive chord in people who have already been crucified. In America people would rather hear the “nice” messages of preachers like Rev. Robert Schuler (who, by the way, broadcasts his show in Russia, where people can hardly believe how stupid it is). I met Father Seraphim a year and a half before his death in 1982. Like him, I had been seeking reality through Eastern religions, etc., by seeking to escape pseudo-reality through a Zen-like breakdown of logical thought processes. Finally, reduced to despair, I listened to Sid Barrett’s two schizophrenic-withdrawal, childhood-regression solo albums over and over, until I had memorized all his word salads. One day Father Seraphim came to the campus where I was going to school. He drove up in an old beat up pick-up truck and emerged in his worn out black robe, his long hair, and his exceedingly long grey beard which had become matted. I was the image of absolute poverty. Next thing I remember I was walking with Father Seraphim through the college. Dinner had just ended and students were milling and hanging around the outside cafeteria. Everyone was staring at Father Seraphim, but he walked through them as naturally as if he had been at home. I the middle of a progressive American college, he seemed like someone who had just stepped out of the 4th century Egyptian desert.
Father Seraphim went to a lecture room and delivered a talk called “Signs of the Coming of the End of the World.” He had happened to be sick at the same time and sniffled throughout his lecture. Obviously exhausted, he yet remained clear-headed, cheerful, and ready to answer questions at length. I could see that he was at least as learned and far more wise than any of my professors, and yet he was clearly a man of the wilderness, more at home in the forest than in a classroom.
What struck me most about Father Seraphim was that here was a man who was totally sacrificing himself for God, for the truth. He was not a university Professor receiving a comfortable salary for being a disseminator of knowledge, nor was he a religious leader who hankered after power, influence, or even a bowl of fruit to be placed at his feet, as did the “spiritual masters” who had followings in that area. He was not “into religion” for what could he get out of it; he was not looking for a crutch to “enjoy spiritual life.” He was just a simple monk who sought the Truth above all else. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would die for that Truth, for I could see he was dying for it already.
-Monk Damascene
Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow - West is making a mistake
MAN OF GOD-LIFE OF ST JOHN MAXIMOVITCH OF SHANGHAI
The Fall of Adam & Eve — A Talk by Fr Seraphim Rose
Twoist Love, Not Oneist Hate
October 29, 2013 by Dr. Peter Jones
“Love is all you need,” said my school chum, John Lennon, and in one sense he was right. The Twoist Christian sense of Christ’s love is “all you need.” Oddly, more and more Christians who defend the normality of heterosexual marriage are not thanked for their love but accused of hate speech and homophobia, now defined as a form of psychological illness. Such groundless indictments of hate betray hearts themselves driven by irrational hate.
Christians may not hate! Unlike the present day sexual progressives and radical Islamists, believers cannot “hate” others. This is so for a number of significant reasons. Followers of Jesus know they are sinners like every one else, and can only pray for fellow sinners. Because God has defined sin for us, Christians can identify sinful behavior, but they don’t do it as “sinless beings” who are better than others. They understand their own estrangement from God and want to help others to see theirs, not to make them feel inferior but to bring them to Christ, the only Savior. In today’s world, with its antipathy to sin, this is becoming a courageous expression of love.
Hatred is also not possible for Christians because they are in no hurry to force people’s will. They know that God is patient, and that he is the only one able to execute ultimate judgment, which he will do one day. “Vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Lord” (Hebrews 10:30). Christians are thus peace-loving and patient.
So why the constant charges of hate? Where does it originate? An article by a secular sociologist, Ernest Sternberg, identifies in present society a growing pressure group that he calls “world purificationists.” He argues that the revolutionary utopian march to an ideal this-worldly city of spiritual and sexual freedom is hampered only by “the enemy.” For real traction, the progressivist vision must identify an “evil” group, worthy of moral hatred.
In her 2010 book, The World Turned Upside Down, United Kingdom Jewish journalist/ philosopher, Melanie Phillips equally describes the rise of the modern ideological Left. She states: “It is essential for the true believer [in radical politics] to have someone or something to hate.” This may explain the accusations of “hate speech” against those who defend the traditional view of marriage. Where there is no God to bring about ultimate justice, the purifiers must execute judgment themselves, here and now. The process begins by clearly naming the enemy. Sternberg notes that those who oppose the program will increasingly become scapegoats, identified as humanity’s enemy and the cause of all suffering.
We are at the stage of scapegoating. My dear friend, Janet Mefferd, a law-abiding citizen, a fine Christian wife and mother, and a gifted radio host who argues for the normality of heterosexual marriage, is vilified and dismissed as a bitter extremist by the public media. The most worrisome statement made about her is not the violent false descriptions of her opinions. It is: “mainstream is the last word to describe Mefferd’s daily offering of bitter animus.”
Homosexuals are mainstream, while Christians are extremists! To identify Christians as marginals, when homosexuals only account for 2-3% of the population is an outrageous statement, but is also the clear sign of a brilliant cultural victory. The Supreme Court, the highest in the land, by identifying the defense of normative heterosexuality with animus, has already marginalized biblical Christians as “hate speakers.”
Marginalization will produce suffering for believers. Under pressure to be considered “mainstream,” Christian radio stations and Christian publishing houses may decide to jettison shows like Janet Mefferd’s, because the audience has become “mainstream.” They will not want to offend LGBT people and will also want to stay within the “law of the land.” The Christian voice will be marginalized to the point of being silenced and we and our children will be condemned to live under the reign of “the lie.”
The early Christians were faced with a similar situation. The first century Roman historian, Tacitus, charged them with the first recorded accusation of hate speech in Church history: “haters of humanity.” They breached the pagan pax romana. And what does Paul propose to the Christians? Certainly not hate! He exhorts the value of three positive reactions:
1. Fearlessly and lovingly preach the power of the Gospel (Rom 1:16)
2. Live before the pagan world with holy bodies (Rom 12:1)
3. Witness to the culture through transformed minds (Rom 12:2), based on an understanding of the difference between Oneist worship of Nature and the Twoism worship of the Creator (Rom 1:25).
May we be given the power of Christ to pray for those who persecute us and to love those who hate us!
Archbishop Aftimios (Ofiesh, d. July 1966) of Brooklyn
Michael Woerl
Dayton, OH, July, 2016
Archbishop Aftimios (Ofiesh) is perhaps the most controversial figure in the history of Orthodoxy in North America. Also, perhaps, exemplary of the questionable episcopal consecrations and/or assignments that seemed to play a large, and often unfortunate part, in the history of Orthodoxy in North America in the early 20th century. Aftimios was counted as a hierarch of ROCOR only from the recognition of ROCOR’s jurisdiction in America by Bishop Alexander (Nemolovsky, +1960) early on, to the schism of the North American diocese from ROCOR in 1927. Deposed, resigned, never left his post … ‘depending on who you ask,’ Aftimios subsequently ventured light years from the farthest borders of canonical Orthodoxy. His legacy remains as a plethora of organizations using the name ‘Orthodox,’ but possessing not even a remote connection to the Orthodox Church. Many of these organizations regard Aftimios as a ‘Saint and Martyr,’ who freed Orthodoxy in America from ‘foreign domination,’ complete with ‘icons’ of Aftimios that illustrate this phenomenon. Aftimios “was also a brilliant, energetic churchman, victim not only to his personal failings, but also to the ecclesiastical turbulence of his time … the history is complicated, though fascinating.” 1
Abdullah Ofiesh was born to the family of Father Gabriel Ofiesh and his wife, Badrah, on 22 October 1880, in Bikfayya/al-Muhaydathah, Lebanon, then within the Ottoman Empire. The sixth of ten children, his name, Abdullah, is Arabic for “Servant of God.” While the rest of the Ofiesh children attended the local village school, the young Abdullah was attracted to the Byzantine music classes at the Monastery of Saint Elias Shurwaya. At the school, the Abbot of the Monastery, Father Mattais, invited his student to become a novice at the Monastery. He accepted. His father did not agree with the decision and took him home after arguing with the Abbot about the propriety of one so young making a life-long decision. After a lecture on the hardships of monastic life by his older brother, Dimitri, who was a lawyer, the young Abdullah could not be swayed. The family decided that he should first attend ‘the best clerical seminary’ in Syria and Lebanon, the Middle Eastern Orthodox Ecclesiastical Seminary. Founded and directed by Bishop Damascene Gabriel (Shatilla) of Lebanon and Beirut, it boasted an eminent and learned faculty, and a ‘broad liberal curriculum.’ At the seminary, Abdullah Ofiesh organized a student organization, which ‘he hoped would stimulate them to sustained progressive and productive endeavors.’ The name of the group was ‘The Young Syrians.’ A periodical named ‘The Balance of Justice’ was undertaken, and this joint venture was to ‘provide for the free expression of thinking,’ and the inception of ‘student generated, controlled, and directed activities.’ The future Archbishop Aftimios also hoped ‘the status of their backward school would be upgraded to that of contemporary schools.’ 2
“The principles, objectives, and bylaws were outlined and submitted for approval through [Father] Musa Kattini, the headmaster … He not only denied approval, but ordered the dissolution of the organization, forbidding any related activities. Bitterly resenting the tyrannical restriction, the students decided to disregard the suppressive unjust decree although fairly certain such a course would result in punitive action.” 3 “After the students refused to abandon their efforts, the headmaster finally allowed them to form a student association with more moderate aims.” 4
After graduating from the Seminary in 1898, Abdullah Ofiesh decided to forego an opportunity to further his education at the Kiev Theological Academy, and chose instead to take a position assisting Bishop Gabriel (Shatilla) in Beirut, where he was apparently tonsured as a monk, ‘took the name Aftimios,’ after Saint Euthymius the Great, and was ordained to the diaconate. He served in Beirut until the death of Bishop Gabriel in 1900, at which time he was appointed as Archdeacon of Latakia by Bishop Arsanius (Haddad, later Patriarch Gregory IV of Antioch). “However, as had been the case in seminary, Aftimios, who became a priest in 1902, began to agitate for reform. Early in his service at Latakia, he organized a society of theology students and young clergy to work for reform within the Patriarchate of Antioch. As had been the case during his efforts to form a similar organization while in seminary, Father Aftimios chose to call his society, ‘The Young Syrians.’ However, once again, his superiors refused to allow Aftimios to carry out his plans. Despite the endorsement of Bishop Arsanius, Patriarch Meletius II [of Antioch] threatened to excommunicate the priest and his friends if they did not abandon their efforts. A few years later, Father Aftimios once again championed the cause of reform … Aided by … several other young students and clergyman, he formed a fellowship dedicated to the modernization of the administration of the Patriarchate and its monastic establishments. Aftimios and friends also hoped to establish a graduate school of theology, thereby ending the dependence of the Church of Antioch on Greek and Russian institutions for advanced theological education. Once again, the young reformer met with stiff resistance from Patriarch Meletius II. Faced [again] with the threat of excommunication, Ofiesh had no choice but to abandon his third effort … for progressive programs within the Church. Greatly disappointed, Father Afitmios finally requested permission from his superiors to travel to North America, where he hoped to serve in a less restrained atmosphere.” 5
Permission was granted, probably gladly … Landing in New York on 13 December 1905, Father Aftimios presented his credentials and letter of introduction to his new superior, Bishop Raphael (Hawaweeny, +1915, glorified by the OCA as Saint Raphael of Brooklyn in 2000) of Brooklyn, who had been educated at the Greek Halki Seminary of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and the Russian Kiev Theological Academy. Assigned to North America to care for Arab Orthodox parishioners of the Russian Diocese, he became the first Orthodox Bishop consecrated in North America. The consecration took place on the Third Sunday of Lent, the Sunday of the Holy Cross, 28 February/13 March, 1904, concelebrated by Bishop Tikhon (Bellavin, +1925, later Patriarch and Holy New Confessor of Russia) of the Aleutians and North America, and Bishop Innokenty (Pustynsky, +1937) of Alaska, in the Saint Nicholas Cathedral in New York. Bishop Innokenty was ‘first vicar’ of the North American Diocese, and Bishop Raphael, ‘second vicar.’ Bishop Raphael reposed on 14/27 February, 1915. 6
There was much strife among the Orthodox Arabs in North America; different factions desired that the Arab parishes go under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Antioch, and a ‘travelling Metropolitan’ (not assigned by the Patriarchate of Antioch to assume jurisdiction in North America) from the Patriarchate of Antioch also had designs on gaining jurisdiction over Arab parishes. Due to the delay of two years by Archbishop Evdokim (Meshchersky, later Renovationist ‘Metropolitan of Odessa, +1935) in appointing a successor for Bishop Raphael, court cases, and the setting up of an Antiochian jurisdiction in North America resulted. Finally, after reporting to the Holy Synod in Russia that “thirty-four of the forty-one [Arab] priests in the Diocese favored the election of Father Aftimos” to succeed Bishop Raphael, the Synod consented, and Archimandrite Aftimios was consecrated in the Saint Nicholas Cathedral in New York on 13 May 1917. The consecration was concelebrated by Archbishop Evdokim, Bishop Alexander (Nemolovsky), and Bishop Stephen (Dzubay, +1933). Supporters of Metropolitan Germanos (the ‘travelling Metropolitan’) had sent over 50 telegrams to leading clergy of the Arab parishes in an attempt to prevent the consecration. 7
The ‘Russy-Antacky’ (the disputants favoring that Arab parishes remain in the Russian Diocese of North America vs. the faction that sought to be under the Patriarchate of Antioch) dispute continued, taking up much of the time and energies of Bishop Aftimios. Nevertheless, he still cared for and served his flock, undertaking social and educational programs for their aid and benefit. As time progressed, and the ‘Russy-Antacky’ dispute was more often the subject of lawsuits, this drained resources in the fight to maintain unity under the Russian Diocese, which had also been involved in its own disputes over jursidiction, resulting in court cases. 8
Archbishop Aftimios served the North American Diocese loyally, attempting to maintain the unity of his Arab flock in America under that Diocese. His struggles were difficult, and he remained faithful. Despite his efforts, eventually, the Arab Orthodox in North America left the Russian Diocese, and established their own diocese under the jurisdiction of the Patriachate of Antioch. Archbishop Aftimios is not remembered today primarily for his service to the Russian Diocese, but for his step out of the bounds of Orthodoxy, with the creation of “The Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church in North America.” This was to be an “Autocephalous” Church, yet, the Russian Diocese in North America would not submit to its jurisdiction; it would remain intact, separate, under its own jurisdiction. The historical circumstances of this “first Autocephalous Orthodox Church” in America are, perhaps purposefully, vague. Metropolitan Platon (Rozhdestvesnky) has been named as its creator, as has Archbishop Aftimios (Ofiesh).
The Fourth All American Council of the North American Diocese was held in Detroit, Michigan, 02-04 April 1924. “The Sobor ‘proclaimed the Russian Orthodox Church in America to be temporarily autonomous unitl the convocation of a new All Russian Council’ … Although the Sobor declared itself merely ‘temporarily autonomous,’ it was in fact making a bid for autocephaly. For the desire of the Sobor was to be fully independent of both Moscow and of the Church Abroad.” 9 And, “the Ecumenical Patriarchate,” “the heretical ‘Living Church’ and its representative Ivan Kedrovsky,” as well as the “schismatic attempts of Bishops Stephen (Dzubay) and Adam (Filippovsky).” 10 “At the Council [Detroit Council of 1924] it was decided that the Orthodox communities of North America should in the future be self-governing. A constitution for an ‘American Orthodox Church’ would be worked out, which would create a quasi-autocephalous status.” 11 “As Basil Bensen writes in the St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, ‘Metropolitan Platon, after the proclamation of the autonomy of the Russian Orthodox Church (in America) of 1924, made a special agreement with the Syrian Archbishop Aftimios to proclaim and independently establish The Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church in North America.’” 11
Also in 1924, Metropolitan Platon took part in the Hierarchical Council of ROCOR in Sremski Karlovtsy, Serbia, was elected a member of the Synod, and displayed complete submission to the Council. In 1926, he again arrived from America at the Council in Sremski Karlovtsy and presented, in a detailed report, recorded in the minutes of the Bishops’ Council, No. 4, of June 14/27, 1926, as follows: … “on the matter of the congress of laymen and priests in Detroit, he said this was permitted by him as a valve for the escape of autocephalic gases …” 12
The final ‘creation’ of the “The Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church in North America” came with the “‘Act of February 2, 1927,’ enacted by the convention of the canonical hierarchy of the Russian Patriarchal Synod [sic] at St. Tikhon’s Monastery at South Canaan, Pennsylvania, presided over by Metropolitan Platon Rozhdestvenskii, decreed that the duty and full responsibility of providing the Orthodox teachings and church sacraments to unattached American-born of any ethnic group, be placed on the primary representative of the Russian Orthodox Mission in North America, Bishop Aftimios, who served as the head of the Syrian Orthodox branch of this mission. For this purpose, Aftimios was empowered and commissioned to constitute, organize, establish, head, lead, and administer, a distinct independent branch of the Orthodox Church to be canonically established and publicly known as ‘The Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church in North America.’ Articles of ’The Act’ specified that auxiliary bishops were to be consecrated to aid the bishop of Brooklyn in carrying out the provisions thereof, and designated Bishops Theophilos [Pashkovsky, later Metropolitan, +1950] of Chicago, and Bishop Arsanious [sic] [Chagovtsev, +1945] of Winnipeg, to serve as co-consecrators with Aftimios, as occasion required … Archbishop Aftimios was to retain his office as archbishop of Brooklyn and head of the Russian Jurisdiction’s Syrian Greek Orthodox Catholic Mission in North America for as long as any parish or clergy remained in the Brooklyn Diocese under the Russian Jurisdiction. The independent church was chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a religious corporation under Archbishop Aftimios as Archbishop President of the Holy Synod, whereby the new church acquired legal, as well as ecclesiastical, reality and existence.” 13 From the foregoing, it can be seen that the “creation” of this “new church” rested squarely on the shoulders of Metropolitan Platon. How a ‘temporarily autonomous’ diocese can create a ’new autocephalous church,’ a ‘distinct independent branch of the Orthodox Church,’ within its own borders, and ‘commission’ one of its own bishops to ‘constitute, organize, establish, head, lead, and administer’ that ‘new church,’ as ‘President Archbishop of the Holy Synod’ of the ‘new church,’ yet also remain serving as a bishop of the ‘temporarily autonomous diocese,’ which continues as a ’temporarily autonomous diocese’ itself, within the boundaries of the ‘distinct independent branch’ is somewhat of a mystery, or perhaps, simply a dreamworld scenario. The most important words of this description of the ‘new church’ seem to be, ‘the new church acquired legal … existence.’ Lawsuit insurance, beneficial to both ‘parties.’
In May 1927, Archbishop Aftimios wrote an unambiguous denunciation of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, concerning its involvement with the consecration of Bishop Adam (Philippovsky, +1956) by Bishop Gorazd [Pavilk, 1879-1942, New Martyr of Prague, executed by the Nazis] of the Czechoslovak Orthodox Church, along with Bishop Stephen (Dzubay, +1933) of the North American Diocese. “… the deflection from Orthodox Catholic jurisdiction and sacramental communion on the part of the Czecho-Slovaks was not the only destruction that the Protestant Episcopal Church accomplished through Bishop Gorazd Pavlik. A small disorderly party of Russians was contesting the regular and accepted authority of the Russian Church Authority in America. While in this country under the shepherding of Messrs. Emhardt, Burgess, and Keating Smith, Bishop Gorazd joined with the schismatic and un-canonical faction and took part in an un-canonical consecration of Adam Philippovsky as a Bishop for the disgruntled faction of Carpatho-Russian and other minority groups … Adam Philippovsky himself has caused no end of trouble and dissension in the Orthodox Church since he was consecrated by this ally of the Protestant Episcopalians.” 14 Appearing in the first issue of ‘The Orthodox Catholic Review,’ this article, obviously, did nothing to endear Archbishop Aftimios to the Episcopalians. Whether Archbishop Aftimios knew, or cared, he made himself formidable enemies.
“ … within about a year after the creation of the AOCC [the ‘new church’ headed by Aftimios] by Russian Metropolia authorities in February of 1927, the Metropolia’s head, Metropolitan Platon Rozhdestvensky, withdrew his support from the new jurisdiction. Indeed, even within just a few months, Platon wrote to Aftimios telling the latter to cease his ‘steppings out’ against the Episcopalians—some of Aftimios’s priests were publishing excoriating comments against the Episcopalians, who had been providing the Russian Metropolia with financial support (hoping, most likely, eventual recognition of the validity of their holy orders). Platon wrote: ‘I must attest before Your Eminence that without their (American Episcopalian) entirely disinterested assistance our Church in America could not exist.’ … Not only was Platon apparently working against Aftimios’s new jurisdiction, but it seemed that he may also have been interfering in the parishes under Aftimios which still remained under the Syrian Mission … No doubt the need for money and other kinds of material support from the Episcopalians was not the only reason for Platon’s reversal on his support for Aftimios, but whatever the case, it’s clear that Platon’s loyalty to his heterodox supporters and to his own agendas was greater than his investment in the new jurisdiction he had signed into being. Aftimios, as may be imagined, reacted quite badly.” 15 In a letter dated 29 October 1929, Archbishop Aftimios expressed his dismay over Metropolitan Platon’s abandonment of the ‘new church.’ “Even in the face of the fact that Your Eminence forbid Bishop Elect Leonid Turkevich from accepting consecration after Your Eminence had yourself proclaimed his election and given orders for his consecration, I have wished to believe it impossible that Your Eminence should secretly attempt to destroy the work of your own hands in the creation of an American Orthodox Catholic Church founded by your order.” 16
On 19 December 1927, Archbishop Aftiimios addressed what was essentially a form letter to the heads of all the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches, to be sent along with a copy of the new church’s constitution: “Your Eminence, Most Reverend and Gracious Prelate, and Beloved Brother in Christ, On behalf of our Holy Faith and Church in America I herewith transmit for your distinguished consideration the Greetings and Appeal of the newly-established Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic ad Apostolic Church in North America, together with the Constitution officially promulgated for the organization and government of American Orthodoxy and the Report and Resolutions of the Convention of the Syrian Greek Orthodox Mission in North America recommending and endorsing the same. Trusting that our North American Holy Synod will shortly receive notice of the favorable consideration and action of Your Eminence and your fellow Hierarchs in that portion of the Holy Orthodox Church which Our Lord Christ has committed to your responsibility, I am, with all prayers and most sincere greetings in the name of our New Born Saviour Christ, Your Eminence’s Brother in Holy Church, [signed] ‘Aftimios,’ Archbishop of Brooklyn, Archbishop President of the North American Holy Synod. Addressed to The Most Reverend Head or Governing Synod of Each Autonomous National Orthodox Catholic Church.” 17
In 1917, the Greek Prime Minister Venizelos forced King Constantine into exile. Venizelos then “designated his nephew,” Meletios Metaxakis as Archbishop of Athens, head of the Greek Orthodox Church. “On the basis of a 1908 decree of the Ecumenical Patriarch that the independent ‘trustee’ Greek parishes in America should receive episcopal oversight from the Church of Greece, Metaxakis journeyed to America in the summer of 1918 to survey the situation. Three months later he returned to Greece and appointed Bishop Alexander of Rodostolou as his resident American legate. … In the Greek elections of 1920, however, Venizelos was defeated. The king returned to power, and Metaxakis was deposed as Archbishop of Athens. Like so many other political refugees, Metaxakis fled to the United States. Still recognized as the head of the Church of Greece by his American legate, Bishop Alexander, Metaxakis presided over the organization of some Greek parishes in North America into a formal ‘Greek Archdiocese’ on September 15, 1921. In yet another surprising reversal of fortune, the exiled Metaxakis was elected Ecumenical Patriarch only two months later (November 15, 1921). Meletios, however, was not about to give up his American creation. In one of his first acts as Patriarch, Metaxakis repealed the 1908 Tomos, in effect transferring jurisdiction of the new Greek Archdiocese from ‘himself’ (as Archbishop of Athens) to ‘himself’ (as the Ecumenical Patriarch).” 18
Obviously, none of the Orthodox Churches would recognize Aftimios’ ‘new church.’ “To anyone knowledgable in Canon Law … Not only did the Russian Bishops under Metropolitan Platon – whose own relationship to the Mother Church was abnormal – not have any authority to set up an autocephalous Church but, obviously [according to the Constitution of the ’new church’] … Metropolitan Platon and his Bishops should have submitted to the new Head of the North American Church, Archbishop Aftimios … One can safely say that Metropolitan Platon and his Bishops (with the exception of Archbishop Aftimios) never had any intention of granting such broad and unlimited authority and jurisdiction, and indeed this may well have been a factor which turned Metropolitan Platon against the new Church soon after its very inception.” 19
The next few years, Archbishop Aftimios wrote apologies and defenses for his ’new church,’ visited various parishes, and attempted to settle disputes, which was, sometimes, successful, and other times resulted in ‘more litigation.’ In 1931 he wrote on the various ‘factions’’ he saw in American Orthodoxy, describing “The Russian Archdiocese and its Syrian Mission,” with himself as “acting head in absence of the Russian Archbishop, also head of the Syrian Mission as Archbishop of Brooklyn and appointed to organize the American Orthodox Church; Metropolitan Platon, formerly of Odessa, suspended but acting without any valid credentials or authority .. “ This work, “The Orthodox Situation in America,” was “published and distributed by Archbishop Aftimios.” Apparently, however, Metropolitan Platon’s ‘credentials’ and ‘authority’ were acceptable when Aftimos was ‘appointed’ to form the ‘new church.’ 20
In 1932, while visiting his parish of Saint Mary’s in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Archbishop Aftimios met a young parishioner, Mariam Namey. He gave Mariam “intensive training in the New Testament” to ready her as a Sunday School instructor. In 1933, while “serving the community in Niagara Falls,” Aftimios was called back to Brooklyn, “to take punitive action” against a hieromonk, “who had been caught corrupting and molesting the parish youth.” 21
“After a night of Gethsemanic agony, he knew what he must do … Conceivably, the heinous act of the hieromonk might well have been the impeller of exposition of the evils of celibacy and precipitator of an Orthodox Church convocation on the issue. As Abraham was called to sacrifice his son Isaac, so now was Aftimios called to sacrifice himself for the cause of restoring within the church the proper concept of the true sanctity of the complete man of God’s creation, male and female in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:27) and to bring it into conformity with the Old, and the New Testament imperatives (Leviticus 21, I Timothy 3, and Titus 1) on the marriage of clergy of all ranks.” 22
Aftimios replied to the call to Brooklyn to decide what punishment the hieromonk merited by saying: “They are not content except that they wallow in vice. I shall not come to Brooklyn this time to wash the hands of the clergy, however, soon you will hear history making news that will shake the nerve and sinew of clergy and laity alike.” The “history making news” was that after Mariam Namey arrived in Niagara Falls due to a telephone summons from Aftimios, “they were quietly married the same day [29 April 1933] in Judge Gold’s chambers.” 23 The night of ‘Gethsemanic agony’ and the ensuing realization of what ‘he must do’ resulted in the marriage of Archbishop Aftimios, which would save the Church from ‘the evils of celibacy.’
After the marriage, Aftimios wrote a tome on the ‘evils of celibacy (9 July, 1933), as well as a declaration, as “ruling hierarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church in the United States” that he “officially and solemnly repudiated, rejected and denied any asserted canonical authority over him or over his priests of the pretended, illegitimate and self-constituted so-called Locum Tenens of Sergius of Moscow, himself the asserted successor of the equally pretended, illegitimate and self-constituted so called Locum Tenens Peter, both of whom, being defiant and uncanonical usurpers of asserted Ecclesiastical Authority in the Russian Orthodox Church have been rejected by legitimate Chief Hierarchs by the Church of Constantinople,” and, thus, “he [Sergius] and all his fellow so-called Hierarchs” are “evidently false Hierarchs destitute of all canonical jurisdiction over any fellow bishop.” (18 August 1933) 24 As the ‘Church of Constantinople,’ nor any other Orthodox Church, recognized Aftimios, or his ‘Church’-doubly so after his marriage-this ‘declaration’ seemingly puts Aftimios in the same boat as both of the ‘equally pretended, illegitimate, defiant and uncanonical usurpers’ he denounced in his declaration. In short, the fruition of the young Aftimios, the rebel, the reformer, threatened more than once with excommunication, coming into flower in the ‘less restrained atmosphere’ of North America.
Sources widely vary on the post nuptial ‘activities’ of Aftimios . “According to the records of Saint Mary’s parish [the parish in Wilkes-Barre, near where Aftimios lived], he ‘was retired,’ and lived in nearby Kingston until his death in 1966’ … According to the book ‘Orthodox Christians in North America (1794-1994)’, however, Aftimios ‘resigned his episcopacy and married’ … The biography by Ofiesh’s widow Mariam claims that Aftimios “fully intended to function as a married bishop, having that intent even before he met Mariam.” 25 Wikipedia states that, “He [Aftimios] held the title of Bishop of Brooklyn from 1917 to April 1933, when he married, thus deposing himself from the episcopacy.”
Whatever Aftimios’ intentions, in the biography written by Aftimios’ widow, the only mentions of Aftimios continuing to serve numbered two: when the mother of Ray and Jay Bishara died, “they asked Aftimios to perform the burial service which was conducted in the Episcopalian Church [apparently, his ’steppings out’ against the Episcopalians had ceased, or were forgotten… ] to avoid conflict in the Orthodox Church,” and that “Aftimios proceeded to act independently, performing ‘irregular’ ordinations and consecrations.’” Aftimios and his family endured a materially poor existence, relying on charity. Aftimios often met and consulted with ‘admirers,’ the instances being less frequent as time passed. 26
Previous to the marriage, more ‘bishops’ were consecrated by Aftimios for the ‘new church.’ On 28 May 1928, Archimandrite Sophronios (Bishara, +1940, ordained a priest in 1917 by Aftimios) was consecrated as Bishop of Los Angeles, by Aftimios concelebrating with Metropolitan Elias of Tyre and Sidon of the Patriarchate of Antioch, and Bishop Emmanuel (Abo-Hatab). In September of 1932, Joseph Žuk (+1934; former Papal Legate to Ukraine, assigned to the US by Pope Benedict XIV, excommunicated by the Roman Catholics in 1928) was consecrated by Aftimios and Bishop Sophronios, “to serve the Ukrainian diocese and to help develop a pan-Orthodox Christianity for North America.” On 27 September 1932, William Albert Nichols (+1947, former Episcopalian, former bishop of two vagante groups, after 1930 became interested in Orthodoxy) was consecrated by Aftimios, Bishop Sophronios (Bishara) and Bishop Joseph (Žuk), “with the ecclesiastical name Ignatius, appointed Archbishop of Washington, D.C. … solely dedicated to the Western Rite.” 27 After the marriage of Aftimios, Bishop Ignatius (Nichols) and Bishop Joseph (Žuk) “met as a council, and declared Aftimios retired. Yet, Bishop Ignatius soon followed his mentor, and married in June, 1933, after which Bishop Sophronios [Bishara] declared Bishop Ignatius as deposed.” 28
The morass of vagante jurisidictions stemming from Aftimios ‘new church’ resulted from several ‘consecrations’ performed by Ignatius Nichols. There are, perhaps, countless entities that claim ‘apostolic succession’ from ’the Aftimios lineage.’ Archbishop James (Toombs, +1970) of ROCOR’s American Mission, before coming to ROCOR, claimed such ‘lineage,’ until his joining with, and consecration by ROCOR. Some of the entities lionize Aftimios as the hero of ‘non-ethnic’ Orthodoxy, and ‘liberator’ from the evils of celibacy, while others seem not to know much of the history behind Aftimios, his name on their website simply ‘proving legitimacy.’ The usual scenario with many of these groups is found in alliances, consecrations, arguments, new ‘churches,’ and then the cycle reruns. A common practice with these groups is repeated consecrations as ‘Bishops,’ to claim several ‘episcopal lines,’ some claiming Orthodox, Monophysite, and Nestorian ‘lines,’ along with Episcopalian and Roman Catholic ‘lines,’ to ‘prove’ their ‘apostolic succession’ goes back all the way to all the Apostles … Much has been made of the assumption that Aftimios is ‘not to blame’ for this enumeration of these groups fraudulently calling themselves “Orthodox,” which span the spectrum from ‘well-meaning’ to bogus groups of people that like to play dress-up and collect money.
Nichols, after leaving the Episcopalians, was ‘consecrated a Bishop’ by Arthur Edward Leighton, ‘Bishop’ of the ‘American Catholic Church.’ Leighton was a ‘Spiritualist,’ and had also consecrated Lauron William de Lawrence, “an American writer and publisher on occult and spiritual topics,” author of “The Great Book of Magical Art.” 29
Finding that his ‘orders were invalid’ in 1930, Nichols then peregrinated to the Apostolic Christian Church, where he was consecrated as a ‘bishop.’ “A schism from the American Catholic Church formed, entitled the Apostolic Christian Church, which in time attracted a number of the more esoteric clergy [many of the vagante groups ‘attract the more esotriec clergy’]… the head of that body, Archbishop Samuel Gregory Lines, performed a consecration assisted by bishops William Albert Nichols, then of the Apostolic Christian Church, and George S.A. Brooks of the Holy African Church, on 20 November 1933.” 30
Apparently, Nichols returned to old haunts after being ‘deposed’ from the ‘new church’ of Aftimios, going on to spawn yet more ’new churches’ by ‘consecrations’ he himself performed. Again, an ‘episcopal consecration’ not ‘well thought out,’ resulting in much damage done. Agitators, rebels, reformers, innovators, discovering the ‘real meaning’ of the Gospel, seeking to overthrow established Church order, and less ‘restriction’ being the common thread …
Aftimios Ofiesh died on 24 July 1966, aged 85. His handwritten will stated:
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. Luke 2:14
To Whom It May Concern:
Please take notice and give heed to honestly and faithfully follow my instruction in executing this, last will of my heart’s desire concerning my passing on and the burial of my body.
First of all, don’t let sorrow touch your heart but instead be of good cheer and rejoice with me for I have been set free from the fetter of the flesh, and completely with my Master, Elder Brother, Jesus Christ, and through Him our loving Father-God.
No clergy of any denomination is to have anything to do with my body, no religious service or any kind of ceremony to be allowed.
No flowers, no gathering, no exposition of body for services.
Don’t notify relatives and friends.
If it is possible burial should take place the same day, and at most the second day.
Box (coffin) should be the cheapest possibe, and use the extra money in good cause where it is relly needed and finally I say again, be of good cheer and rejoice with me in the Lord, Christ in you the hope of glory.
January 7, 1963
Aftimios Ofiesh”
Aftimios Ofiesh was buried on 25 July, 1966 in the Maple Hill Cemetery in Hanover Township, Pennsylvania. 31
Michael Woerl
Dayton, OH, July, 2016
Archbishop Aftimios (Ofiesh) is perhaps the most controversial figure in the history of Orthodoxy in North America. Also, perhaps, exemplary of the questionable episcopal consecrations and/or assignments that seemed to play a large, and often unfortunate part, in the history of Orthodoxy in North America in the early 20th century. Aftimios was counted as a hierarch of ROCOR only from the recognition of ROCOR’s jurisdiction in America by Bishop Alexander (Nemolovsky, +1960) early on, to the schism of the North American diocese from ROCOR in 1927. Deposed, resigned, never left his post … ‘depending on who you ask,’ Aftimios subsequently ventured light years from the farthest borders of canonical Orthodoxy. His legacy remains as a plethora of organizations using the name ‘Orthodox,’ but possessing not even a remote connection to the Orthodox Church. Many of these organizations regard Aftimios as a ‘Saint and Martyr,’ who freed Orthodoxy in America from ‘foreign domination,’ complete with ‘icons’ of Aftimios that illustrate this phenomenon. Aftimios “was also a brilliant, energetic churchman, victim not only to his personal failings, but also to the ecclesiastical turbulence of his time … the history is complicated, though fascinating.” 1
Abdullah Ofiesh was born to the family of Father Gabriel Ofiesh and his wife, Badrah, on 22 October 1880, in Bikfayya/al-Muhaydathah, Lebanon, then within the Ottoman Empire. The sixth of ten children, his name, Abdullah, is Arabic for “Servant of God.” While the rest of the Ofiesh children attended the local village school, the young Abdullah was attracted to the Byzantine music classes at the Monastery of Saint Elias Shurwaya. At the school, the Abbot of the Monastery, Father Mattais, invited his student to become a novice at the Monastery. He accepted. His father did not agree with the decision and took him home after arguing with the Abbot about the propriety of one so young making a life-long decision. After a lecture on the hardships of monastic life by his older brother, Dimitri, who was a lawyer, the young Abdullah could not be swayed. The family decided that he should first attend ‘the best clerical seminary’ in Syria and Lebanon, the Middle Eastern Orthodox Ecclesiastical Seminary. Founded and directed by Bishop Damascene Gabriel (Shatilla) of Lebanon and Beirut, it boasted an eminent and learned faculty, and a ‘broad liberal curriculum.’ At the seminary, Abdullah Ofiesh organized a student organization, which ‘he hoped would stimulate them to sustained progressive and productive endeavors.’ The name of the group was ‘The Young Syrians.’ A periodical named ‘The Balance of Justice’ was undertaken, and this joint venture was to ‘provide for the free expression of thinking,’ and the inception of ‘student generated, controlled, and directed activities.’ The future Archbishop Aftimios also hoped ‘the status of their backward school would be upgraded to that of contemporary schools.’ 2
“The principles, objectives, and bylaws were outlined and submitted for approval through [Father] Musa Kattini, the headmaster … He not only denied approval, but ordered the dissolution of the organization, forbidding any related activities. Bitterly resenting the tyrannical restriction, the students decided to disregard the suppressive unjust decree although fairly certain such a course would result in punitive action.” 3 “After the students refused to abandon their efforts, the headmaster finally allowed them to form a student association with more moderate aims.” 4
After graduating from the Seminary in 1898, Abdullah Ofiesh decided to forego an opportunity to further his education at the Kiev Theological Academy, and chose instead to take a position assisting Bishop Gabriel (Shatilla) in Beirut, where he was apparently tonsured as a monk, ‘took the name Aftimios,’ after Saint Euthymius the Great, and was ordained to the diaconate. He served in Beirut until the death of Bishop Gabriel in 1900, at which time he was appointed as Archdeacon of Latakia by Bishop Arsanius (Haddad, later Patriarch Gregory IV of Antioch). “However, as had been the case in seminary, Aftimios, who became a priest in 1902, began to agitate for reform. Early in his service at Latakia, he organized a society of theology students and young clergy to work for reform within the Patriarchate of Antioch. As had been the case during his efforts to form a similar organization while in seminary, Father Aftimios chose to call his society, ‘The Young Syrians.’ However, once again, his superiors refused to allow Aftimios to carry out his plans. Despite the endorsement of Bishop Arsanius, Patriarch Meletius II [of Antioch] threatened to excommunicate the priest and his friends if they did not abandon their efforts. A few years later, Father Aftimios once again championed the cause of reform … Aided by … several other young students and clergyman, he formed a fellowship dedicated to the modernization of the administration of the Patriarchate and its monastic establishments. Aftimios and friends also hoped to establish a graduate school of theology, thereby ending the dependence of the Church of Antioch on Greek and Russian institutions for advanced theological education. Once again, the young reformer met with stiff resistance from Patriarch Meletius II. Faced [again] with the threat of excommunication, Ofiesh had no choice but to abandon his third effort … for progressive programs within the Church. Greatly disappointed, Father Afitmios finally requested permission from his superiors to travel to North America, where he hoped to serve in a less restrained atmosphere.” 5
Permission was granted, probably gladly … Landing in New York on 13 December 1905, Father Aftimios presented his credentials and letter of introduction to his new superior, Bishop Raphael (Hawaweeny, +1915, glorified by the OCA as Saint Raphael of Brooklyn in 2000) of Brooklyn, who had been educated at the Greek Halki Seminary of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and the Russian Kiev Theological Academy. Assigned to North America to care for Arab Orthodox parishioners of the Russian Diocese, he became the first Orthodox Bishop consecrated in North America. The consecration took place on the Third Sunday of Lent, the Sunday of the Holy Cross, 28 February/13 March, 1904, concelebrated by Bishop Tikhon (Bellavin, +1925, later Patriarch and Holy New Confessor of Russia) of the Aleutians and North America, and Bishop Innokenty (Pustynsky, +1937) of Alaska, in the Saint Nicholas Cathedral in New York. Bishop Innokenty was ‘first vicar’ of the North American Diocese, and Bishop Raphael, ‘second vicar.’ Bishop Raphael reposed on 14/27 February, 1915. 6
There was much strife among the Orthodox Arabs in North America; different factions desired that the Arab parishes go under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Antioch, and a ‘travelling Metropolitan’ (not assigned by the Patriarchate of Antioch to assume jurisdiction in North America) from the Patriarchate of Antioch also had designs on gaining jurisdiction over Arab parishes. Due to the delay of two years by Archbishop Evdokim (Meshchersky, later Renovationist ‘Metropolitan of Odessa, +1935) in appointing a successor for Bishop Raphael, court cases, and the setting up of an Antiochian jurisdiction in North America resulted. Finally, after reporting to the Holy Synod in Russia that “thirty-four of the forty-one [Arab] priests in the Diocese favored the election of Father Aftimos” to succeed Bishop Raphael, the Synod consented, and Archimandrite Aftimios was consecrated in the Saint Nicholas Cathedral in New York on 13 May 1917. The consecration was concelebrated by Archbishop Evdokim, Bishop Alexander (Nemolovsky), and Bishop Stephen (Dzubay, +1933). Supporters of Metropolitan Germanos (the ‘travelling Metropolitan’) had sent over 50 telegrams to leading clergy of the Arab parishes in an attempt to prevent the consecration. 7
The ‘Russy-Antacky’ (the disputants favoring that Arab parishes remain in the Russian Diocese of North America vs. the faction that sought to be under the Patriarchate of Antioch) dispute continued, taking up much of the time and energies of Bishop Aftimios. Nevertheless, he still cared for and served his flock, undertaking social and educational programs for their aid and benefit. As time progressed, and the ‘Russy-Antacky’ dispute was more often the subject of lawsuits, this drained resources in the fight to maintain unity under the Russian Diocese, which had also been involved in its own disputes over jursidiction, resulting in court cases. 8
Archbishop Aftimios served the North American Diocese loyally, attempting to maintain the unity of his Arab flock in America under that Diocese. His struggles were difficult, and he remained faithful. Despite his efforts, eventually, the Arab Orthodox in North America left the Russian Diocese, and established their own diocese under the jurisdiction of the Patriachate of Antioch. Archbishop Aftimios is not remembered today primarily for his service to the Russian Diocese, but for his step out of the bounds of Orthodoxy, with the creation of “The Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church in North America.” This was to be an “Autocephalous” Church, yet, the Russian Diocese in North America would not submit to its jurisdiction; it would remain intact, separate, under its own jurisdiction. The historical circumstances of this “first Autocephalous Orthodox Church” in America are, perhaps purposefully, vague. Metropolitan Platon (Rozhdestvesnky) has been named as its creator, as has Archbishop Aftimios (Ofiesh).
The Fourth All American Council of the North American Diocese was held in Detroit, Michigan, 02-04 April 1924. “The Sobor ‘proclaimed the Russian Orthodox Church in America to be temporarily autonomous unitl the convocation of a new All Russian Council’ … Although the Sobor declared itself merely ‘temporarily autonomous,’ it was in fact making a bid for autocephaly. For the desire of the Sobor was to be fully independent of both Moscow and of the Church Abroad.” 9 And, “the Ecumenical Patriarchate,” “the heretical ‘Living Church’ and its representative Ivan Kedrovsky,” as well as the “schismatic attempts of Bishops Stephen (Dzubay) and Adam (Filippovsky).” 10 “At the Council [Detroit Council of 1924] it was decided that the Orthodox communities of North America should in the future be self-governing. A constitution for an ‘American Orthodox Church’ would be worked out, which would create a quasi-autocephalous status.” 11 “As Basil Bensen writes in the St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, ‘Metropolitan Platon, after the proclamation of the autonomy of the Russian Orthodox Church (in America) of 1924, made a special agreement with the Syrian Archbishop Aftimios to proclaim and independently establish The Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church in North America.’” 11
Also in 1924, Metropolitan Platon took part in the Hierarchical Council of ROCOR in Sremski Karlovtsy, Serbia, was elected a member of the Synod, and displayed complete submission to the Council. In 1926, he again arrived from America at the Council in Sremski Karlovtsy and presented, in a detailed report, recorded in the minutes of the Bishops’ Council, No. 4, of June 14/27, 1926, as follows: … “on the matter of the congress of laymen and priests in Detroit, he said this was permitted by him as a valve for the escape of autocephalic gases …” 12
The final ‘creation’ of the “The Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church in North America” came with the “‘Act of February 2, 1927,’ enacted by the convention of the canonical hierarchy of the Russian Patriarchal Synod [sic] at St. Tikhon’s Monastery at South Canaan, Pennsylvania, presided over by Metropolitan Platon Rozhdestvenskii, decreed that the duty and full responsibility of providing the Orthodox teachings and church sacraments to unattached American-born of any ethnic group, be placed on the primary representative of the Russian Orthodox Mission in North America, Bishop Aftimios, who served as the head of the Syrian Orthodox branch of this mission. For this purpose, Aftimios was empowered and commissioned to constitute, organize, establish, head, lead, and administer, a distinct independent branch of the Orthodox Church to be canonically established and publicly known as ‘The Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church in North America.’ Articles of ’The Act’ specified that auxiliary bishops were to be consecrated to aid the bishop of Brooklyn in carrying out the provisions thereof, and designated Bishops Theophilos [Pashkovsky, later Metropolitan, +1950] of Chicago, and Bishop Arsanious [sic] [Chagovtsev, +1945] of Winnipeg, to serve as co-consecrators with Aftimios, as occasion required … Archbishop Aftimios was to retain his office as archbishop of Brooklyn and head of the Russian Jurisdiction’s Syrian Greek Orthodox Catholic Mission in North America for as long as any parish or clergy remained in the Brooklyn Diocese under the Russian Jurisdiction. The independent church was chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a religious corporation under Archbishop Aftimios as Archbishop President of the Holy Synod, whereby the new church acquired legal, as well as ecclesiastical, reality and existence.” 13 From the foregoing, it can be seen that the “creation” of this “new church” rested squarely on the shoulders of Metropolitan Platon. How a ‘temporarily autonomous’ diocese can create a ’new autocephalous church,’ a ‘distinct independent branch of the Orthodox Church,’ within its own borders, and ‘commission’ one of its own bishops to ‘constitute, organize, establish, head, lead, and administer’ that ‘new church,’ as ‘President Archbishop of the Holy Synod’ of the ‘new church,’ yet also remain serving as a bishop of the ‘temporarily autonomous diocese,’ which continues as a ’temporarily autonomous diocese’ itself, within the boundaries of the ‘distinct independent branch’ is somewhat of a mystery, or perhaps, simply a dreamworld scenario. The most important words of this description of the ‘new church’ seem to be, ‘the new church acquired legal … existence.’ Lawsuit insurance, beneficial to both ‘parties.’
In May 1927, Archbishop Aftimios wrote an unambiguous denunciation of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, concerning its involvement with the consecration of Bishop Adam (Philippovsky, +1956) by Bishop Gorazd [Pavilk, 1879-1942, New Martyr of Prague, executed by the Nazis] of the Czechoslovak Orthodox Church, along with Bishop Stephen (Dzubay, +1933) of the North American Diocese. “… the deflection from Orthodox Catholic jurisdiction and sacramental communion on the part of the Czecho-Slovaks was not the only destruction that the Protestant Episcopal Church accomplished through Bishop Gorazd Pavlik. A small disorderly party of Russians was contesting the regular and accepted authority of the Russian Church Authority in America. While in this country under the shepherding of Messrs. Emhardt, Burgess, and Keating Smith, Bishop Gorazd joined with the schismatic and un-canonical faction and took part in an un-canonical consecration of Adam Philippovsky as a Bishop for the disgruntled faction of Carpatho-Russian and other minority groups … Adam Philippovsky himself has caused no end of trouble and dissension in the Orthodox Church since he was consecrated by this ally of the Protestant Episcopalians.” 14 Appearing in the first issue of ‘The Orthodox Catholic Review,’ this article, obviously, did nothing to endear Archbishop Aftimios to the Episcopalians. Whether Archbishop Aftimios knew, or cared, he made himself formidable enemies.
“ … within about a year after the creation of the AOCC [the ‘new church’ headed by Aftimios] by Russian Metropolia authorities in February of 1927, the Metropolia’s head, Metropolitan Platon Rozhdestvensky, withdrew his support from the new jurisdiction. Indeed, even within just a few months, Platon wrote to Aftimios telling the latter to cease his ‘steppings out’ against the Episcopalians—some of Aftimios’s priests were publishing excoriating comments against the Episcopalians, who had been providing the Russian Metropolia with financial support (hoping, most likely, eventual recognition of the validity of their holy orders). Platon wrote: ‘I must attest before Your Eminence that without their (American Episcopalian) entirely disinterested assistance our Church in America could not exist.’ … Not only was Platon apparently working against Aftimios’s new jurisdiction, but it seemed that he may also have been interfering in the parishes under Aftimios which still remained under the Syrian Mission … No doubt the need for money and other kinds of material support from the Episcopalians was not the only reason for Platon’s reversal on his support for Aftimios, but whatever the case, it’s clear that Platon’s loyalty to his heterodox supporters and to his own agendas was greater than his investment in the new jurisdiction he had signed into being. Aftimios, as may be imagined, reacted quite badly.” 15 In a letter dated 29 October 1929, Archbishop Aftimios expressed his dismay over Metropolitan Platon’s abandonment of the ‘new church.’ “Even in the face of the fact that Your Eminence forbid Bishop Elect Leonid Turkevich from accepting consecration after Your Eminence had yourself proclaimed his election and given orders for his consecration, I have wished to believe it impossible that Your Eminence should secretly attempt to destroy the work of your own hands in the creation of an American Orthodox Catholic Church founded by your order.” 16
On 19 December 1927, Archbishop Aftiimios addressed what was essentially a form letter to the heads of all the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches, to be sent along with a copy of the new church’s constitution: “Your Eminence, Most Reverend and Gracious Prelate, and Beloved Brother in Christ, On behalf of our Holy Faith and Church in America I herewith transmit for your distinguished consideration the Greetings and Appeal of the newly-established Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic ad Apostolic Church in North America, together with the Constitution officially promulgated for the organization and government of American Orthodoxy and the Report and Resolutions of the Convention of the Syrian Greek Orthodox Mission in North America recommending and endorsing the same. Trusting that our North American Holy Synod will shortly receive notice of the favorable consideration and action of Your Eminence and your fellow Hierarchs in that portion of the Holy Orthodox Church which Our Lord Christ has committed to your responsibility, I am, with all prayers and most sincere greetings in the name of our New Born Saviour Christ, Your Eminence’s Brother in Holy Church, [signed] ‘Aftimios,’ Archbishop of Brooklyn, Archbishop President of the North American Holy Synod. Addressed to The Most Reverend Head or Governing Synod of Each Autonomous National Orthodox Catholic Church.” 17
In 1917, the Greek Prime Minister Venizelos forced King Constantine into exile. Venizelos then “designated his nephew,” Meletios Metaxakis as Archbishop of Athens, head of the Greek Orthodox Church. “On the basis of a 1908 decree of the Ecumenical Patriarch that the independent ‘trustee’ Greek parishes in America should receive episcopal oversight from the Church of Greece, Metaxakis journeyed to America in the summer of 1918 to survey the situation. Three months later he returned to Greece and appointed Bishop Alexander of Rodostolou as his resident American legate. … In the Greek elections of 1920, however, Venizelos was defeated. The king returned to power, and Metaxakis was deposed as Archbishop of Athens. Like so many other political refugees, Metaxakis fled to the United States. Still recognized as the head of the Church of Greece by his American legate, Bishop Alexander, Metaxakis presided over the organization of some Greek parishes in North America into a formal ‘Greek Archdiocese’ on September 15, 1921. In yet another surprising reversal of fortune, the exiled Metaxakis was elected Ecumenical Patriarch only two months later (November 15, 1921). Meletios, however, was not about to give up his American creation. In one of his first acts as Patriarch, Metaxakis repealed the 1908 Tomos, in effect transferring jurisdiction of the new Greek Archdiocese from ‘himself’ (as Archbishop of Athens) to ‘himself’ (as the Ecumenical Patriarch).” 18
Obviously, none of the Orthodox Churches would recognize Aftimios’ ‘new church.’ “To anyone knowledgable in Canon Law … Not only did the Russian Bishops under Metropolitan Platon – whose own relationship to the Mother Church was abnormal – not have any authority to set up an autocephalous Church but, obviously [according to the Constitution of the ’new church’] … Metropolitan Platon and his Bishops should have submitted to the new Head of the North American Church, Archbishop Aftimios … One can safely say that Metropolitan Platon and his Bishops (with the exception of Archbishop Aftimios) never had any intention of granting such broad and unlimited authority and jurisdiction, and indeed this may well have been a factor which turned Metropolitan Platon against the new Church soon after its very inception.” 19
The next few years, Archbishop Aftimios wrote apologies and defenses for his ’new church,’ visited various parishes, and attempted to settle disputes, which was, sometimes, successful, and other times resulted in ‘more litigation.’ In 1931 he wrote on the various ‘factions’’ he saw in American Orthodoxy, describing “The Russian Archdiocese and its Syrian Mission,” with himself as “acting head in absence of the Russian Archbishop, also head of the Syrian Mission as Archbishop of Brooklyn and appointed to organize the American Orthodox Church; Metropolitan Platon, formerly of Odessa, suspended but acting without any valid credentials or authority .. “ This work, “The Orthodox Situation in America,” was “published and distributed by Archbishop Aftimios.” Apparently, however, Metropolitan Platon’s ‘credentials’ and ‘authority’ were acceptable when Aftimos was ‘appointed’ to form the ‘new church.’ 20
In 1932, while visiting his parish of Saint Mary’s in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Archbishop Aftimios met a young parishioner, Mariam Namey. He gave Mariam “intensive training in the New Testament” to ready her as a Sunday School instructor. In 1933, while “serving the community in Niagara Falls,” Aftimios was called back to Brooklyn, “to take punitive action” against a hieromonk, “who had been caught corrupting and molesting the parish youth.” 21
“After a night of Gethsemanic agony, he knew what he must do … Conceivably, the heinous act of the hieromonk might well have been the impeller of exposition of the evils of celibacy and precipitator of an Orthodox Church convocation on the issue. As Abraham was called to sacrifice his son Isaac, so now was Aftimios called to sacrifice himself for the cause of restoring within the church the proper concept of the true sanctity of the complete man of God’s creation, male and female in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:27) and to bring it into conformity with the Old, and the New Testament imperatives (Leviticus 21, I Timothy 3, and Titus 1) on the marriage of clergy of all ranks.” 22
Aftimios replied to the call to Brooklyn to decide what punishment the hieromonk merited by saying: “They are not content except that they wallow in vice. I shall not come to Brooklyn this time to wash the hands of the clergy, however, soon you will hear history making news that will shake the nerve and sinew of clergy and laity alike.” The “history making news” was that after Mariam Namey arrived in Niagara Falls due to a telephone summons from Aftimios, “they were quietly married the same day [29 April 1933] in Judge Gold’s chambers.” 23 The night of ‘Gethsemanic agony’ and the ensuing realization of what ‘he must do’ resulted in the marriage of Archbishop Aftimios, which would save the Church from ‘the evils of celibacy.’
After the marriage, Aftimios wrote a tome on the ‘evils of celibacy (9 July, 1933), as well as a declaration, as “ruling hierarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church in the United States” that he “officially and solemnly repudiated, rejected and denied any asserted canonical authority over him or over his priests of the pretended, illegitimate and self-constituted so-called Locum Tenens of Sergius of Moscow, himself the asserted successor of the equally pretended, illegitimate and self-constituted so called Locum Tenens Peter, both of whom, being defiant and uncanonical usurpers of asserted Ecclesiastical Authority in the Russian Orthodox Church have been rejected by legitimate Chief Hierarchs by the Church of Constantinople,” and, thus, “he [Sergius] and all his fellow so-called Hierarchs” are “evidently false Hierarchs destitute of all canonical jurisdiction over any fellow bishop.” (18 August 1933) 24 As the ‘Church of Constantinople,’ nor any other Orthodox Church, recognized Aftimios, or his ‘Church’-doubly so after his marriage-this ‘declaration’ seemingly puts Aftimios in the same boat as both of the ‘equally pretended, illegitimate, defiant and uncanonical usurpers’ he denounced in his declaration. In short, the fruition of the young Aftimios, the rebel, the reformer, threatened more than once with excommunication, coming into flower in the ‘less restrained atmosphere’ of North America.
Sources widely vary on the post nuptial ‘activities’ of Aftimios . “According to the records of Saint Mary’s parish [the parish in Wilkes-Barre, near where Aftimios lived], he ‘was retired,’ and lived in nearby Kingston until his death in 1966’ … According to the book ‘Orthodox Christians in North America (1794-1994)’, however, Aftimios ‘resigned his episcopacy and married’ … The biography by Ofiesh’s widow Mariam claims that Aftimios “fully intended to function as a married bishop, having that intent even before he met Mariam.” 25 Wikipedia states that, “He [Aftimios] held the title of Bishop of Brooklyn from 1917 to April 1933, when he married, thus deposing himself from the episcopacy.”
Whatever Aftimios’ intentions, in the biography written by Aftimios’ widow, the only mentions of Aftimios continuing to serve numbered two: when the mother of Ray and Jay Bishara died, “they asked Aftimios to perform the burial service which was conducted in the Episcopalian Church [apparently, his ’steppings out’ against the Episcopalians had ceased, or were forgotten… ] to avoid conflict in the Orthodox Church,” and that “Aftimios proceeded to act independently, performing ‘irregular’ ordinations and consecrations.’” Aftimios and his family endured a materially poor existence, relying on charity. Aftimios often met and consulted with ‘admirers,’ the instances being less frequent as time passed. 26
Previous to the marriage, more ‘bishops’ were consecrated by Aftimios for the ‘new church.’ On 28 May 1928, Archimandrite Sophronios (Bishara, +1940, ordained a priest in 1917 by Aftimios) was consecrated as Bishop of Los Angeles, by Aftimios concelebrating with Metropolitan Elias of Tyre and Sidon of the Patriarchate of Antioch, and Bishop Emmanuel (Abo-Hatab). In September of 1932, Joseph Žuk (+1934; former Papal Legate to Ukraine, assigned to the US by Pope Benedict XIV, excommunicated by the Roman Catholics in 1928) was consecrated by Aftimios and Bishop Sophronios, “to serve the Ukrainian diocese and to help develop a pan-Orthodox Christianity for North America.” On 27 September 1932, William Albert Nichols (+1947, former Episcopalian, former bishop of two vagante groups, after 1930 became interested in Orthodoxy) was consecrated by Aftimios, Bishop Sophronios (Bishara) and Bishop Joseph (Žuk), “with the ecclesiastical name Ignatius, appointed Archbishop of Washington, D.C. … solely dedicated to the Western Rite.” 27 After the marriage of Aftimios, Bishop Ignatius (Nichols) and Bishop Joseph (Žuk) “met as a council, and declared Aftimios retired. Yet, Bishop Ignatius soon followed his mentor, and married in June, 1933, after which Bishop Sophronios [Bishara] declared Bishop Ignatius as deposed.” 28
The morass of vagante jurisidictions stemming from Aftimios ‘new church’ resulted from several ‘consecrations’ performed by Ignatius Nichols. There are, perhaps, countless entities that claim ‘apostolic succession’ from ’the Aftimios lineage.’ Archbishop James (Toombs, +1970) of ROCOR’s American Mission, before coming to ROCOR, claimed such ‘lineage,’ until his joining with, and consecration by ROCOR. Some of the entities lionize Aftimios as the hero of ‘non-ethnic’ Orthodoxy, and ‘liberator’ from the evils of celibacy, while others seem not to know much of the history behind Aftimios, his name on their website simply ‘proving legitimacy.’ The usual scenario with many of these groups is found in alliances, consecrations, arguments, new ‘churches,’ and then the cycle reruns. A common practice with these groups is repeated consecrations as ‘Bishops,’ to claim several ‘episcopal lines,’ some claiming Orthodox, Monophysite, and Nestorian ‘lines,’ along with Episcopalian and Roman Catholic ‘lines,’ to ‘prove’ their ‘apostolic succession’ goes back all the way to all the Apostles … Much has been made of the assumption that Aftimios is ‘not to blame’ for this enumeration of these groups fraudulently calling themselves “Orthodox,” which span the spectrum from ‘well-meaning’ to bogus groups of people that like to play dress-up and collect money.
Nichols, after leaving the Episcopalians, was ‘consecrated a Bishop’ by Arthur Edward Leighton, ‘Bishop’ of the ‘American Catholic Church.’ Leighton was a ‘Spiritualist,’ and had also consecrated Lauron William de Lawrence, “an American writer and publisher on occult and spiritual topics,” author of “The Great Book of Magical Art.” 29
Finding that his ‘orders were invalid’ in 1930, Nichols then peregrinated to the Apostolic Christian Church, where he was consecrated as a ‘bishop.’ “A schism from the American Catholic Church formed, entitled the Apostolic Christian Church, which in time attracted a number of the more esoteric clergy [many of the vagante groups ‘attract the more esotriec clergy’]… the head of that body, Archbishop Samuel Gregory Lines, performed a consecration assisted by bishops William Albert Nichols, then of the Apostolic Christian Church, and George S.A. Brooks of the Holy African Church, on 20 November 1933.” 30
Apparently, Nichols returned to old haunts after being ‘deposed’ from the ‘new church’ of Aftimios, going on to spawn yet more ’new churches’ by ‘consecrations’ he himself performed. Again, an ‘episcopal consecration’ not ‘well thought out,’ resulting in much damage done. Agitators, rebels, reformers, innovators, discovering the ‘real meaning’ of the Gospel, seeking to overthrow established Church order, and less ‘restriction’ being the common thread …
Aftimios Ofiesh died on 24 July 1966, aged 85. His handwritten will stated:
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. Luke 2:14
To Whom It May Concern:
Please take notice and give heed to honestly and faithfully follow my instruction in executing this, last will of my heart’s desire concerning my passing on and the burial of my body.
First of all, don’t let sorrow touch your heart but instead be of good cheer and rejoice with me for I have been set free from the fetter of the flesh, and completely with my Master, Elder Brother, Jesus Christ, and through Him our loving Father-God.
No clergy of any denomination is to have anything to do with my body, no religious service or any kind of ceremony to be allowed.
No flowers, no gathering, no exposition of body for services.
Don’t notify relatives and friends.
If it is possible burial should take place the same day, and at most the second day.
Box (coffin) should be the cheapest possibe, and use the extra money in good cause where it is relly needed and finally I say again, be of good cheer and rejoice with me in the Lord, Christ in you the hope of glory.
January 7, 1963
Aftimios Ofiesh”
Aftimios Ofiesh was buried on 25 July, 1966 in the Maple Hill Cemetery in Hanover Township, Pennsylvania. 31
- The featured photo and the 3rd phote are from orthodoxhistory.org
- http://orthodoxhistory.org/2012/07/25/the-death-of-aftimios-ofiesh/ ↩
- Ofiesh, Marian Namey, Archbishop Aftimios Ofiesh, 1880-1966, A Biography Revealing HIs Contribution to Orthodoxy and Christendom, 1997, pp 8-10 ↩
- ibid., p. 12 ↩
- Morris, Archpriest John Warren, The Life of the Thrice-Blessed Archbishop Aftimios Ofiesh, online @ http://almoutran.com//2011/03/326 ↩
- ibid. ↩
- https://oca.org/saints/lives/2008/02/27/100610-repose-of-st-raphael-the-bishop-of-brooklyn ↩
- op. cit. 4 ↩
- op. cit. 4 ↩
- Holy Transfiguration Monastery, A History of the Russian Church Abroad, 1917-1971, p. 75 ↩
- (Afonsky), BIshop Gregory, A History of the Orthodox Church in America, 1917-1934, Saint Herman’s Theological Seminary Press, Kodiak, Alaska 1994 p. 115 ↩
- Seide, Father Georg, History of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia from its Beginning to the Present (1983), manuscript copy, Part IV, p. 48 ↩
- Rodzianko, M., The Truth About the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, translated from the Russian by Michael P. HIlko, Jordanville, 1975 ↩
- op. cit. 2, pp. 130-131 ↩
- Aftimios, Archbishop of Brooklyn “Present and Future of Orthodoxy in America in Relation to Other Bodies and to Orthodoxy Abroad,” in The Orthodox Catholic Review, Vol. I, No. IV-V, April-May 1927 online @: http://westernorthodoxy.org/pdf/writings1pdf ↩
- http://orthodoxhistory.org/2009/11/04/the-reversal-of-platon-rozhdestvensky/ ↩
- http://orthodoxhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Aftimios-Platon-1928-1029.pdf ↩
- op. cit. 2, p. 240 ↩
- https://oca.org/history-archives/orthodox-christians-na/chapter-5 ↩
- Surrency, Archimandrite Serafim, The Quest for Orthodox Church Unity in America, Saints Boris and Gleb Press, 1973, p. 37 ↩
- op. cit. 2, pp. 138 & 151 ↩
- op. cit., 2, pp. 180-181 ↩
- op. cit., 2, pp. 181 ↩
- op. cit., 2, pp. 182 ↩
- op. cit., 2, pp.194-195 ↩
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/Aftimios_Ofiesh ↩
- op. cit., 2, p. 202, 205, 196-223 ↩
- http://orthodox-catholic.tripod.com/OrthodoxHistory_org_Ignatius_Nichols.htm ↩
- http://orthodoxwiki.org/Ignatius_(Nichols)_of_Washington ↩
- https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2316634A/L._W._de_Laurence ↩
- http://san-luigi.org/ecclesia/the-order-of-antioch/history-of-the-order-of-antioch ↩
- op. cit., 2, pp. 226-227, 229 ↩
Truth Matters: The Spiritual State of the West
Dr. Peter Jones - The Great Opponent of Contemporary Christianity
Imagine There’s No [Christian] Religion
June 28, 2018 by Dr. Peter Jones
Jeremiah said of ancient Israel: “Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush” (Jeremiah 8:12).
Since the Sixties, pagan religion has permeated our thinking in once-Christian Western society. Those who remember the days when our moral principles were generally based on God’s commandments are shocked by the takeover of morality, exhibited even in rulings from our highest courts. Increasingly, we hear of “non-binary” actions and judgments that relativize truth and morals. There is no either/or; no external measure of right and wrong—only a blend that fits our personal choices.
The Media
In the media, “fake news” (a deliberate misrepresentation of facts to support certain political ideas) has become the norm. The crying baby on the Southern border proves the inhumanity of the US president, until….we discover that, according to its father, the baby was never separated from her mother, and, in addition, the mother had abandoned three other children in Honduras to come make money in the USA.
Academia
In academia, the open exchange of ideas in a climate of free speech, once the essence of academic life, is often deliberately suppressed in our centers of higher learning. Wake up, folks! We send our young people to these colleges and universities at enormous personal and government expense, to be educated for mature adulthood. But they enter ideological centers of cultural neo-Marxism, identity politics and uninhibited sexual license, which ridicules and suppresses any other opinions. The dormitories have become brothels, and barbaric sex orgies are normal fare for university students. The annual Sex Week at Northwestern University will feature Lady Sophia, a Chicago-based dominatrix who will teach the students bondage, discipline, and sadomasochistic practices. At the venerable Oxford University in the UK an “annual bash sees students whipping virgins, engaging drug-fueled orgies and watching live sex shows.”
On questions of free speech, even the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), historically committed to the preservation of free speech, is beginning to capitulate to the anti-speech left, arguing that “progress toward equality” (which includes sexual excess) trumps freedom of speech.
Speech about traditional (largely Christian) sexual morals is no longer “free speech.” It is under attack. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a suggested presidential candidate, reveals how upside-down our moral judgments have become. Warren was infuriated by Rudolph Giuliani ’s remarks on porn star Stormy Daniels: “I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman, or a woman of substance, or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman, and as a person. And isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation.” Said Warren in reaction: “Insult to a porn star is an insult to every woman.” Our culture insists that Daniels is a noble “sex worker,” free, like Lady Sophia (above), to ply her trade at Oxford or any other university. All work, including prostitution, is “good” work. Morals have vanished.
Witchcraft
We have taken the Bible off its place at the family dining table, the living room and (especially) the bedroom. We’ve tossed it (Good Riddance) in the Goodwill dumpster. We are now free to search for moral authority elsewhere—say…to witchcraft, why not? David Salisbury, a self-identified witch, rises up as a defender of cultural values, blaming the NRA for recent school killings. He and seven other witches sit around a table on which a cauldron sits atop a pentacle, accompanied by “a five-dollar bill painted red—to symbolize blood—and a piece of paper with the huge block letters ‘NRA.’” These witches were engaged in the ritual of “Binding,” of casting spells as a new form of defending cultural values. Salisbury stridently hurls curses at those he characterizes as “merchants of mayhem, profiteers of pain, dealers of death,” who “fatten on the blood of innocents and feast like demons on their corpses!” He continues, “May your thoughts and prayers turn to poison in your mouths.” Witches are rising as paragons of moral virtue, though their practice of human sacrifice is ignored.
Not to be outdone, the Brotherhood of the Unnamed Path also offers a moral solution. It’s source for determining morals is a “spiritual tradition revealed to its members from the ancestors of men-who-love-men, employ age-old techniques practiced around the world that foster relationships with the divine, the ancestors, the spirits in the land and with each other.” These Brothers rise up, morally indignant, to oppose the separation of children and parents at the southern border: “We stand against these policies as dictated and enforced by the attorney general and the current administration. We condemn in the strongest terms the justification of these actions by statements of religious scripture or by indicating a need to intimidate and provoke fear.” These spiritualists, by their sexual choices, reject the very possibility of having children, yet publicly propose themselves as the moral defenders of children.
From Binary to Non-Binary
In the revamping of our culture, Christianity no longer defines morality. Indeed, the very notion of morality has shifted. A new kind of thinking is afoot, a “non-binary” approach, which eliminates clear distinctions. “Binary,” meaning “two,” emphasizes clear definitions, whereas “non-binary” considers everything to be relative. At truthXchange we use the terms “Oneism” (the merging of all distinctions) and “Twoism” (the acceptance of God’s created distinctions). In sexuality, our culture no longer sees male and female as essential; in spirituality, our culture blends God and nature into one vague spiritual whole. Such thinking is widespread and comes from the invasion of Eastern spirituality and morality. Sociologists write of The Easternization of the West, “quite unlike anything previously experienced.”[1] “As large numbers of Americans have arrived at the worldview of Hinduism,” says sociologist Phillip Goldberg, author of American Veda, the change is compared “in power to the Christian Great Awakenings of the 18th century.”[2] Goldberg says that everyone is now asked to believe in the Hindu “Advaita” way. “Advaita” in Sanskrit means “not two.” That is, nothing is “binary.” Nothing is Twoist! In this world, Christianity does not belong. It is possible to be quite specific as to how this change in thinking has occurred.
Eastern techniques of Advaita spirituality require a different way of thinking. When Westerners spend billions of dollars in the pursuit and practice of Hindu yoga and Buddhist mindfulness meditation, with the full endorsement of the popular Dalai Lama, you can be sure that the culture will be deeply changed. Mindfulness practices have skyrocketed in the West recently. Magazines feature it, celebrities swear by it, scientists study it, monks still practice it and business leaders use it for stress relief (e.g. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Steve Jobs of Apple and Jeff Weiner, founder of LinkedIn). Apple, Google and Nike provide meditation rooms that encourage brief sessions during the workday, though a recent study shows that mindfulness is demotivating for employees, so it does not always work!
Cultural Effects
Here is proof of its effects. Christine Chandler, an academically trained psychotherapist was a disciple of Tibetan Buddhism who practiced mindfulness meditation for hours each day for nearly thirty years. In her book Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism, she provides an indisputable, objective witness to the effects of such practice on the mind.
Simple mindfulness meditation for the Western beginner asks you to stop thinking, stop analyzing right and wrong, and to live in the moment to relieve stress. However, the deeper you get in mindfulness, under the instruction of lamas (holy men), you learn that the real intention of mindfulness is to show, as Buddhism has always believed, that the world is “just an illusion” (100). Eventually, the self and the other must be destroyed (36) via the “esoteric logic of non-duality” (37). “Non-duality” is another way of referring to the “non-binary” mentioned above. In this logic, “facts do not exist” (14), “lying is allowed” (8), and “history is not real” (9). Christine Chandler finally realized that “the lamas can do whatever they want, because they [are] already dwelling in a state of nonduality” (xxii). They taught that the use of reason is the “obstacle to compassion and enlightenment” (17), that “moral judgments about right and wrong…[are] the enemy,” and that “basic goodness…[is] beyond any judgment of good and bad” (xxi). She saw this as a manipulation of language in the service of spiritual power. Also, the ultimate goal of mindfulness, which Chandler, as a non-Christian does not see, is the classic Buddhist goal of denying the objectivity of created reality and its role of witnessing to God, the Creator of reality.
Chandler does realize, however, that this way of thinking and spiritual practice becomes a form of brainwashing, which is how she finally experienced it. She left the group after almost thirty years, having understood that “your reasoning mind, objectivity, and ability to judge, starts to slowly turn off” (102). “Part of my mind had definitely fallen asleep for nearly thirty years,” she says (104). Her conclusion is that mindfulness meditation is “mind-control,” and that “…if you can diminish the ability to reason and think objectively…you can eventually weaken the foundation of Western civilization…” (preface). This, she believes, is the intention of Eastern Buddhism.
How is the project working?
Three Canadian Events
I was in Ontario, Canada, recently. If Canada is an example of what will happen everywhere in the West, Christians will soon be shut out of any significant cultural roles. Clearly something has happened to Western civilization that makes Christianity a dangerous threat, which must be criminalized and eliminated. Mindfulness is everywhere in Canadian culture and receives the favor of the courts.Three events stood out:
1. The Huffington Post shows pictures of twenty policemen in dress uniform, sitting on prayer stools, deep in meditation in a Buddhist temple. These officers, from Ontario’s Peel Regional Police Force, were in the temple for a lecture on mindfulness meditation and Buddhist philosophy. The deputy abbot, Bhante Saranapala, observed with satisfaction: “They were very nice and they liked it and they think it should be part of their daily practice.” But how will law-enforcement professionals, trained in “binary” right/wrong Western laws, do police work using the “non-binary” principles of Buddhist spirituality? Can they issue a “fake” parking ticket marked “guilty and not really guilty” in order to avoid stress?
2. Canadian Bill Whatcott, long-time anti-abortion and pro-family activist, was informed in mid-June, 2018 that a national criminal arrest warrant has been issued for him. He is wanted for a “hate speech” crime that took place two years ago in Toronto! His “hate speech” crime was distributing leaflets that present the Gospel and the biblical truth about homosexuality to Toronto’s homosexual pride parade in 2016. The authorities had to think a long time before inventing this crime, for which he faces a minimum of two years in jail.
3. Also in June, 2018 a ruling came down from the Supreme Court of Canada, concerning a case against a Christian college, Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. In 2012, Trinity Western announced its plan to open a law school. The Law Societies of British Columbia, Ontario and Nova Scotia, objected because the school would require students to sign a covenant restricting sexual relations to those between a man and woman within a lawful marriage. TWU’s mandatory covenant demands classically-defined holy Christian living “characterized by humility, self-sacrifice, mercy and justice, and mutual submission for the good of others.” It requires members to abstain from using vulgar language, lying or cheating, stealing, using degrading materials such as pornography, and “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.”
The Court stated that law graduates from Trinity who model their lives this way would not be recognized as valid lawyers. Trinity appealed for reasons of religious discrimination. Last week, while I was there, the Supreme Court of Canada concluded in a 7–2 decision that tolerance of LGBTQ was required of TWU, but the LGBTQ community did not have to tolerate Christians’ constitutional rights, which could be overridden. The court determined that LGBTQ’s rights and non-binary Oneist sexual thinking were paramount to the “public interest” and required the infringement of religious rights and the living out of biblical moral principles, thus the denial of Christians to freely practice law according to biblical binary or Twoist principles. In the words of Michael Brown, “the court ruled that Christianity and higher education are incompatible” and that any Christian living this way in Canada is a threat to the culture. “The majority judgment said the covenant would deter LGBT students from attending the proposed law school, and those who did attend would be at risk of significant harm.” The significant harm would be exposure to Christian truth about sexuality which may not be allowed to flourish in modern cultures that claim to be civilized. Canadian Christians have concluded: “…there is little space left in our political culture for religious institutions to fully and equally participate in the public square since their beliefs and moral values whether at work, in education or in politics are now subject to determinations by administrative bodies.” Needless to say, this decision also denies the very basis of modern society, namely pluralism and diversity, what we call free speech. The Supreme Court of Canada, like the ACLU, has become an embarrassment to its own values—if one were still to think in binary terms!
One of the judges defended his judgment against Christian norms as being “what’s best for Canadian society.” He never said how he knows what is best, and there is no discussion, because his judgment is a classic example of religiously-inspired, pagan, non-binary, power-driven, social engineering. The deep soul of the West, so long under the binary either/or influence of the Bible, has been utterly transformed in the minds of its leading jurists, who have come to believe that diversity means “all views are welcome other than biblical Christian views.” For this judge, biblical views, including those of the Queen (who is still Queen in Canada), are not what is best for Canadian society.
Christians in the West must be sobered by Canada’s suffering but must not remain silent. All nations need to understand that the Bible alone contains what is best, both for a blessed life in this world and a blessed life in the next, based on the promise of Scripture: “Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him” (Gen 18:18). One day this blessing will come when Jesus will reign unopposed over his creation and at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:10–11).
[1] Colin Campbell, The Easternization of the West: A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era (Boulder London: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 39–41.
[2] Philip Goldberg, American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West (New York: Harmony Books, 2010), 5.
Western youngsters are potty trained to believe in nothing
By Jules Gomes
As the Beatles would sum it up: ‘We are nowhere men, in a nowhere land, making all our nowhere plans, for nobody.’ As a distinct civilization, Europe is finished. The future of Europe is a culture war between young adults with no religion and young adults who are committed Muslims. The future of Europe is Islam.
The University of Greenwich was my crystal ball into which I peered and saw the future of Europe. As a distinct civilisation, Europe was finished. The future of Europe was Islam. My sepulchral prediction was based not on media hysteria or Right-wing paranoia, but on my observation of the obvious.
At Greenwich, the "center of the world" and the home of the Prime Meridian, I led a team of chaplains ministering to 23,000 students and hundreds of staff.
Amidst the grandeur of Sir Christopher Wren’s architecture, one element stuck out as incongruously as a giraffe’s neck on an ostrich farm. Wren’s edifice told the story of Western civilization and its Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman foundations. Now, the monument had become a mausoleum. The sole religious occupants were not Christians or Jews, but Muslims.
As chaplains, we learned our first lesson. We could reliably assume that almost every young adult who came from a white British or European background had no religious affiliation. Sociologists have coined a term for these young adults. They call them ‘nones’ because the ‘nones’ believe in ‘nothing’ – of course, nones believe in diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism and intersectionality, but believe in nothing transcendent, eternal, or ultimate. Above all, they believe that life is all about ‘having fun’.
Europe is finished. The future of Europe is Islam.
Despite our extensive pastoral care offered to the community, our team of five chaplains found it difficult to recruit even five students to a weekly Bible study or a service of Holy Communion. The nones constituted the majority of British and European young adults and they were busy ‘having fun’.
The Muslim students and staff were not ‘having fun’ but ‘having faith’. They were praying five times a day, observing a strict fast during Ramadan and preaching Islam to the Anglo-Saxon infidels. Their prayer room overflowed on Fridays on to Wren’s colonnades.
I saw Greenwich as a microcosm of Britain and much of Europe, heading for an Islamic future. Now, fourteen years later, an impressive study by St Mary’s University, Twickenham and the Institut Catholique de Paris has confirmed my prediction with hard facts and raw data. The author of "Europe's Young Adults and Religion" is the highly respected Stephen Bullivant, Professor of Theology and Sociology of Religion at St Mary’s.
Bullivant combines data from the European Social Surveys of 2014 and 2016. He focuses on young adults (or youth) between 16 and 29 years of age and surveys 22 countries including Israel and Russia. ‘The high percentage of young adults affirming no religion in many countries, is arguably the most significant fact here,’ he bluntly observes. The study found that in 12 out of the 22 countries, more than half of young adults claim not to identify with any particular religion or denomination. In 19 of them, more than a third make the same claim.
‘The high percentage of young adults affirming no religion in many countries, is arguably the most significant fact here.’ Professor Steven Bullivant
Poland is the only European country where the Christian commitment of young adults equals the fervour of my Muslim students at Greenwich.
Bullivant’s findings for France and Britain are little short of funereal. ‘Overall, “no religion” is the default identity of French and British young adults alike, accounting for around two-thirds of each.’ Sixty-four per cent of French young adults and 70 per cent of British youth have no religion.
In fact, they are potty-trained to believe in ‘nothing’. Four out of every five young adult ‘nones’ in France and Britain say they were brought up with no religion, and have retained this lack of belief into adulthood.
If you are a militant atheist like Richard Dawkins, you should be belting out the Beatles’ Imagine. For the first time in history a continent has jettisoned its God. Christianity is dead. You’ve won. We’ve lost. Imagine there’s no heaven. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today! Yes, John Lennon, and they are living to ‘have fun’.
However, the consequences of Europe’s de-Christianisation are not funny at all. Nature abhors a vacuum and nothing will not fill the black hole of nothingness dug out by the nones (neither will inclusion or postmodern relativism). Islam will occupy the formerly Christian ‘Sea of Faith’ retreating with its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’, painted so poignantly by Matthew Arnold.
The consequences of Europe’s de-Christianisation are not funny at all.
Only seven per cent of British youth identify as Anglican and ten per cent as Catholics compared with six per cent as Muslims. In France, two per cent identify as Protestants, totally outnumbered by ten per cent of Muslims. In all, 26 per cent of French and 21 per cent of British young adults identify as Christians.
But when you probe further and test the commitment of Catholic and Anglican youth in the UK and France, it is at the level of motherhood and apple pie. A very high proportion of youth calling themselves Christians don’t attend services or pray regularly.
The Church of England, like almost all other denominations, raises its young people on the protein-free diet of fun, Messy Church, Café Church and socialism-lite. Islam feeds its young people the whole milk of the Koran and the strong meat of jihad (interpreted as both spiritual struggle and physical warfare).
Imagine two European teams playing The Weakest Link. Team Muslim comprises a ‘significant minority’ of young adults. Team Nones is made up of the rest. Team Muslim are armed with spiritual cannonballs. They are prepared to make great sacrifices and even die for their beliefs. Team Nones are armed with postmodern ping-pong balls – they believe in nothing and will not make even the smallest sacrifice because the supreme goal of their existence is to have fun. The referee is the marginalised group of Marmalade Christians (who for all practical purposes are as good as the nones).
Islam feeds its young people the whole milk of the Koran and the strong meat of jihad.
The future of Europe is a culture war between young adults with no religion and young adults who are committed Muslims. Who will win? ‘Fire!’ shouts the referee. The cannonballs from Team Muslim thunder in the direction of Team Nones.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. When Islam began its long march against Eastern Christianity beginning in the seventh century AD, many Christians saw it as God’s judgement on a decadent Christianity. They linked it to ‘Assyria, the rod of my anger.’
On Good Friday 2018, I peer into Bible and see the alternative future of Europe. Europe entombed, can be raised from the dead. When President Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, he opened his Bible with a specific passage. Vice President Mike Pence placed his hand on the same verse when he took the oath of office.
The text is from 2 Chronicles 7:14 and quotes God’s words to King Solomon: ‘If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal the land.’
By Jules Gomes
As the Beatles would sum it up: ‘We are nowhere men, in a nowhere land, making all our nowhere plans, for nobody.’ As a distinct civilization, Europe is finished. The future of Europe is a culture war between young adults with no religion and young adults who are committed Muslims. The future of Europe is Islam.
The University of Greenwich was my crystal ball into which I peered and saw the future of Europe. As a distinct civilisation, Europe was finished. The future of Europe was Islam. My sepulchral prediction was based not on media hysteria or Right-wing paranoia, but on my observation of the obvious.
At Greenwich, the "center of the world" and the home of the Prime Meridian, I led a team of chaplains ministering to 23,000 students and hundreds of staff.
Amidst the grandeur of Sir Christopher Wren’s architecture, one element stuck out as incongruously as a giraffe’s neck on an ostrich farm. Wren’s edifice told the story of Western civilization and its Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman foundations. Now, the monument had become a mausoleum. The sole religious occupants were not Christians or Jews, but Muslims.
As chaplains, we learned our first lesson. We could reliably assume that almost every young adult who came from a white British or European background had no religious affiliation. Sociologists have coined a term for these young adults. They call them ‘nones’ because the ‘nones’ believe in ‘nothing’ – of course, nones believe in diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism and intersectionality, but believe in nothing transcendent, eternal, or ultimate. Above all, they believe that life is all about ‘having fun’.
Europe is finished. The future of Europe is Islam.
Despite our extensive pastoral care offered to the community, our team of five chaplains found it difficult to recruit even five students to a weekly Bible study or a service of Holy Communion. The nones constituted the majority of British and European young adults and they were busy ‘having fun’.
The Muslim students and staff were not ‘having fun’ but ‘having faith’. They were praying five times a day, observing a strict fast during Ramadan and preaching Islam to the Anglo-Saxon infidels. Their prayer room overflowed on Fridays on to Wren’s colonnades.
I saw Greenwich as a microcosm of Britain and much of Europe, heading for an Islamic future. Now, fourteen years later, an impressive study by St Mary’s University, Twickenham and the Institut Catholique de Paris has confirmed my prediction with hard facts and raw data. The author of "Europe's Young Adults and Religion" is the highly respected Stephen Bullivant, Professor of Theology and Sociology of Religion at St Mary’s.
Bullivant combines data from the European Social Surveys of 2014 and 2016. He focuses on young adults (or youth) between 16 and 29 years of age and surveys 22 countries including Israel and Russia. ‘The high percentage of young adults affirming no religion in many countries, is arguably the most significant fact here,’ he bluntly observes. The study found that in 12 out of the 22 countries, more than half of young adults claim not to identify with any particular religion or denomination. In 19 of them, more than a third make the same claim.
‘The high percentage of young adults affirming no religion in many countries, is arguably the most significant fact here.’ Professor Steven Bullivant
Poland is the only European country where the Christian commitment of young adults equals the fervour of my Muslim students at Greenwich.
Bullivant’s findings for France and Britain are little short of funereal. ‘Overall, “no religion” is the default identity of French and British young adults alike, accounting for around two-thirds of each.’ Sixty-four per cent of French young adults and 70 per cent of British youth have no religion.
In fact, they are potty-trained to believe in ‘nothing’. Four out of every five young adult ‘nones’ in France and Britain say they were brought up with no religion, and have retained this lack of belief into adulthood.
If you are a militant atheist like Richard Dawkins, you should be belting out the Beatles’ Imagine. For the first time in history a continent has jettisoned its God. Christianity is dead. You’ve won. We’ve lost. Imagine there’s no heaven. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today! Yes, John Lennon, and they are living to ‘have fun’.
However, the consequences of Europe’s de-Christianisation are not funny at all. Nature abhors a vacuum and nothing will not fill the black hole of nothingness dug out by the nones (neither will inclusion or postmodern relativism). Islam will occupy the formerly Christian ‘Sea of Faith’ retreating with its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’, painted so poignantly by Matthew Arnold.
The consequences of Europe’s de-Christianisation are not funny at all.
Only seven per cent of British youth identify as Anglican and ten per cent as Catholics compared with six per cent as Muslims. In France, two per cent identify as Protestants, totally outnumbered by ten per cent of Muslims. In all, 26 per cent of French and 21 per cent of British young adults identify as Christians.
But when you probe further and test the commitment of Catholic and Anglican youth in the UK and France, it is at the level of motherhood and apple pie. A very high proportion of youth calling themselves Christians don’t attend services or pray regularly.
The Church of England, like almost all other denominations, raises its young people on the protein-free diet of fun, Messy Church, Café Church and socialism-lite. Islam feeds its young people the whole milk of the Koran and the strong meat of jihad (interpreted as both spiritual struggle and physical warfare).
Imagine two European teams playing The Weakest Link. Team Muslim comprises a ‘significant minority’ of young adults. Team Nones is made up of the rest. Team Muslim are armed with spiritual cannonballs. They are prepared to make great sacrifices and even die for their beliefs. Team Nones are armed with postmodern ping-pong balls – they believe in nothing and will not make even the smallest sacrifice because the supreme goal of their existence is to have fun. The referee is the marginalised group of Marmalade Christians (who for all practical purposes are as good as the nones).
Islam feeds its young people the whole milk of the Koran and the strong meat of jihad.
The future of Europe is a culture war between young adults with no religion and young adults who are committed Muslims. Who will win? ‘Fire!’ shouts the referee. The cannonballs from Team Muslim thunder in the direction of Team Nones.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. When Islam began its long march against Eastern Christianity beginning in the seventh century AD, many Christians saw it as God’s judgement on a decadent Christianity. They linked it to ‘Assyria, the rod of my anger.’
On Good Friday 2018, I peer into Bible and see the alternative future of Europe. Europe entombed, can be raised from the dead. When President Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, he opened his Bible with a specific passage. Vice President Mike Pence placed his hand on the same verse when he took the oath of office.
The text is from 2 Chronicles 7:14 and quotes God’s words to King Solomon: ‘If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal the land.’
by Joseph Torres
According to transhumanism, what is the chief problem with humanity? It is human finitude. Unlike the Bible, which anchors the fall of man in our moral rebellion against our glorious Creator, transhumanism sees human limitedness and physical frailty as the main problems to be overcome. Our determination of human normalcy (what is expected of the human experience in terms of physiological performance, cognitive abilities, and life-span) has not kept up with the modern technological and scientific advances. We need technologically, biologically, and ethically, to get with the program. To state the contrast again, whereas the Bible sees the problem as a broken relationship with God (a moral issue), transhumanism locates the problem with our limitedness or being (an ontological issue).We all, in our own way, and according to our own worldviews, long for redemption. This search for redemption touches us, though in different ways. Our search for personal and global redemption takes the form of several familiar questions: What is wrong with our world? What requires saving? Who will do the saving? and What does this saving look like? The Western abandonment of Christianity doesn’t eliminate this longing for salvation, it simply redirects it according to non-Christian standards.
One of the latest challenges posed to the biblical worldview is that of transhumanism. For some time now, many of us have been vaguely familiar with the worldview, mostly through movies and television. Stanley Kubrick’s film Artificial Intelligence (2001), Her (2013), Elysium (2013), and Ex Machina (2014) all contain transhumanist ideology.
Though the movement denies being a lifestyle, a self-help guide, or even a religion[1], we must beyond the superficial to really understand the movement. From a theological perspective, transhumanism is, in fact, a cosmology, a post-secular oneist view of anthropology (the doctrine of humanity), harmatiology (the doctrine of sin), soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), and even an eschatology (the doctrine of the last things, especially addressing the question of where is history finally going).
Transhumanism is a diverse movement with roots in rational humanism[2] and numerous other sources, as Michael Graham has so well documented in his piece “The Roots of Transhumanism.”[3]
What is transhumanism?
It’s always helpful to define major terms, and with a mouthful like transhumanism we need to know precisely what the term conveys. Thankfully its advocates have been extraordinarily clear in self-defining their movement, its motivations, and its proposed solutions for mankind’s problems.
Terms. Originally, a transhumanist is simply someone who advocates transhumanism.[4] A “transhuman” refers to an intermediary form between the human and the posthuman.[5] According to one transhumanist website:
The etymology of the term “transhuman” goes back to the futurist FM-2030 (also known as F. M. Estfandiary), who introduced it as shorthand for “transitional human”. Calling transhumans the “earliest manifestation of new evolutionary beings,” FM maintained that signs of transhumanity included prostheses, plastic surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilization), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values. However, FM’s diagnostics are of dubious validity.[6]
The point of the “trans” in transhumanism is that we are moving (transitioning) toward something greater. Advocates of the movement point to our growing dependence on smart phones/watches, wearable bio-monitors, and other tech that enhances human experience. All of this was unthinkable to our grandparents and their parents before them. These days we regularly hear of “regenerative medicine, stem cell therapies, smart prosthetics, genetic engineering, nanomedicine, cryonics, nootropics, [and] neuropharmacology”[7] But why stop there?
Many transhumanists….yearn to reach intellectual heights as far above any current human genius as humans are above other primates; to be resistant to disease and impervious to aging; to have unlimited youth and vigor; to exercise control over their own desires, moods, and mental states; to be able to avoid feeling tired, hateful, or irritated about petty things; to have an increased capacity for pleasure, love, artistic appreciation, and serenity; to experience novel states of consciousness that current human brains cannot access. [8]
Though the movement is far from mainstream, its numbers are growing. One transhumanist organization, Humanity+, claims to have approximately 6000 followers. These numbers include both members and newsletter subscribers. Furthermore, Humanity+ bills itself as an international nonprofit membership organization with followers from over 100 countries. Humanity+ adopted the Transhumanist Declaration, a the result of a joint effort between members of Extropy Institute, World Transhumanist Association, and other transhumanist groups worldwide.
Transhumanism as Cosmology
Transhumanism must be recognized for what it is, a rival and alternatives to biblical teaching. Let’s briefly examine the major doctrines of transhumanism.
Transhumanist anthropology
Back in 1990, Max Moore taught that transhumanism was a tool of evolution, a philosophy that aims to accelerate the development of “intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values.” [9] On Whatistranshumanism.org it is admitted that “The human desire to acquire posthuman attributes is as ancient as the human species itself.”[10] The great irony in this is its twisted truth. Humanity has in fact been seeking “posthuman” attributes since the Garden of Eden, when Satan first uttered to Eve “You will be as God” (Gen. 3:5)
How is this “transhumanizing” to be accomplished? By “making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”[11]A biblical view of humanity sees the human race as created good, fallen, and in Christ is redeemed, morally renewed, and on its way to permanent glorification in the New Heavens and Earth. Christians look at humanity now and see, apart from the transformative power of the Holy Spirit, a rebellious image-bearer of God. Transhumanists likewise do not see humans as what they should be. “The human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.”[12] And whereas Christians see the cultural mandate to wisely steward creation as coming from God (Gen. 1:28), transhumanism sees this in terms of technological mastery over our environment:
One could say that manipulating nature is an important part of what civilization and human intelligence is all about; we have been doing it since the invention of the wheel. Alternatively, one could say that since we are part of nature, everything we do and create is in a sense natural too.[13]
Transhumanist harmatiology and soteriology According to transhumanism what is the chief problem with humanity? It is human finitude. Unlike the Bible, which anchors the fall of man in our moral rebellion against our glorious Creator, transhumanism sees human limitedness and physical frailty as the main problems to be overcome. Our determination of human normalcy (what is expected of the human experience in terms of physiological performance, cognitive abilities, and life-span) has not kept up with the modern technological and scientific advances. We need technologically, biologically, and ethically, to get with the program. To state the contrast again, whereas the Bible sees the problem as a broken relationship with God (a moral issue), transhumanism locates the problem with our limitedness or being (an ontological issue).
Salvation is offered through “radical technological modifications” [14] which would include “advocates the use of technologies that intervene with human physiology including nanotechnology, nanomedicine, biotechnology, genetic engineering, stem cell cloning, and transgenesis.”[15] This kind of extreme human updating is a must because the steps required to take us to the posthuman phase of development are too profound to be achievable by merely altering some aspect of psychological theory or the way we think about ourselves.”[16]
Transhumanist eschatology
The endgame for transhumanism, is the attainment of post-human status. Reaching this may mean jettisoning our “bodies altogether and live as information patterns on vast super-fast computer networks. [17] Once thinks of the 2014 film Transcendence to get an idea of what this could look like. Here we would reach a point in (post)human history where “death shall be no more” (Cf. Rev. 21:4). This would mean that “possible future beings” might very well be “no longer unambiguously human by our current standards”[18] or even that “The boundaries between posthuman minds may not be as sharply defined as those between humans”[19] Here we run into a common Oneist theme, not merely blurring the distinct between God and creation, but also the blurring of distinctions within creation.
The Twoist Alternative
All this makes for a new kind of secularized Gnosticism in which the integrity of our bodily existence is relativized, a mere obstacle in the way of our truest redemption, a liberation for the limitation of creatureliness. But, as the church father Irenaeus (approx. 130-202 AD) taught against the Gnostics of his day, creaturely limitedness is not a bad thing, not something to be overcome by transcending the body. It was God’s idea. It was his design to determine humanity’s” allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26) and to call it all “very good” (Gen. 1:31).
In theological language, the fall is ethical, not metaphysical. Once a transcendent-yet-personal Creator God is rejected (as in all Oneist systems), the problems of human experience are always found in some aspect or principle of the finite universe. But since in the Bible, the most ultimate reality is a Person (God), we learn that what is broken isn’t our created nature as humans, it’s our relationship with God. A focus on the wrong problem leads to a wrong solution. Biblical truth also affirms that the frailty of our bodies and the entropy of our world signal a need for transformation. As Paul put it, the creation (which certainly includes us) has been “subjected to futility,” and that it creation groans (Rom. 8:22-24). On this, Christianity and tranhumanism agree: The breakdown of our bodies signals the need for newness, a transcending of our current state.
But unlike transhumanism, and in line with the radical approach of Paul himself, Christians see our physical breakdown as a sign, a signal of humanity’s estrangement from our Creator. Falleness, not finitude, is what needs transcending, and that will only come about by Spirit’s final comic revealing of the sons of God- those who belong to God by adoption through the reconciling work of Jesus Christ.
[1] “What is Transhumanism?” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-transhuman
Accessed 9/917
[2] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at https://christandpopculture.com/the-coming-ethical-conundrums-of-transhumanism/ Accessed 9/917
[3] http://read.christandpopculture.com/issue/57219067ada6e22ac9d18359/for_the_humans_and_transhumans_among_us
[4] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-transhuman
accessed 9/917
[5] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-transhuman
accessed 9/917
[6] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-transhuman
accessed 9/917
[7] http://humanityplus.org/about/mission/. Accessed 9/917
[8] What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-posthuman accessed 9/917
[9] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at whatistranshumanism.org accessed 9/9/17
[10] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-are-the-philosophical-and-cultural-antecedents-of-transhumanism Accessed 9/917
[11] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at whatistranshumanism.org accessed 9/9/17
[12] Ibid.
[13] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#isnt-this-tampering-with-nature
Accessed 9/917
[14] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-posthuman accessed 9/917
[15] http://humanityplus.org/about/mission/. Accessed 9/917
[16] “What is Transhumanism?”
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
According to transhumanism, what is the chief problem with humanity? It is human finitude. Unlike the Bible, which anchors the fall of man in our moral rebellion against our glorious Creator, transhumanism sees human limitedness and physical frailty as the main problems to be overcome. Our determination of human normalcy (what is expected of the human experience in terms of physiological performance, cognitive abilities, and life-span) has not kept up with the modern technological and scientific advances. We need technologically, biologically, and ethically, to get with the program. To state the contrast again, whereas the Bible sees the problem as a broken relationship with God (a moral issue), transhumanism locates the problem with our limitedness or being (an ontological issue).We all, in our own way, and according to our own worldviews, long for redemption. This search for redemption touches us, though in different ways. Our search for personal and global redemption takes the form of several familiar questions: What is wrong with our world? What requires saving? Who will do the saving? and What does this saving look like? The Western abandonment of Christianity doesn’t eliminate this longing for salvation, it simply redirects it according to non-Christian standards.
One of the latest challenges posed to the biblical worldview is that of transhumanism. For some time now, many of us have been vaguely familiar with the worldview, mostly through movies and television. Stanley Kubrick’s film Artificial Intelligence (2001), Her (2013), Elysium (2013), and Ex Machina (2014) all contain transhumanist ideology.
Though the movement denies being a lifestyle, a self-help guide, or even a religion[1], we must beyond the superficial to really understand the movement. From a theological perspective, transhumanism is, in fact, a cosmology, a post-secular oneist view of anthropology (the doctrine of humanity), harmatiology (the doctrine of sin), soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), and even an eschatology (the doctrine of the last things, especially addressing the question of where is history finally going).
Transhumanism is a diverse movement with roots in rational humanism[2] and numerous other sources, as Michael Graham has so well documented in his piece “The Roots of Transhumanism.”[3]
What is transhumanism?
It’s always helpful to define major terms, and with a mouthful like transhumanism we need to know precisely what the term conveys. Thankfully its advocates have been extraordinarily clear in self-defining their movement, its motivations, and its proposed solutions for mankind’s problems.
Terms. Originally, a transhumanist is simply someone who advocates transhumanism.[4] A “transhuman” refers to an intermediary form between the human and the posthuman.[5] According to one transhumanist website:
The etymology of the term “transhuman” goes back to the futurist FM-2030 (also known as F. M. Estfandiary), who introduced it as shorthand for “transitional human”. Calling transhumans the “earliest manifestation of new evolutionary beings,” FM maintained that signs of transhumanity included prostheses, plastic surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilization), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values. However, FM’s diagnostics are of dubious validity.[6]
The point of the “trans” in transhumanism is that we are moving (transitioning) toward something greater. Advocates of the movement point to our growing dependence on smart phones/watches, wearable bio-monitors, and other tech that enhances human experience. All of this was unthinkable to our grandparents and their parents before them. These days we regularly hear of “regenerative medicine, stem cell therapies, smart prosthetics, genetic engineering, nanomedicine, cryonics, nootropics, [and] neuropharmacology”[7] But why stop there?
Many transhumanists….yearn to reach intellectual heights as far above any current human genius as humans are above other primates; to be resistant to disease and impervious to aging; to have unlimited youth and vigor; to exercise control over their own desires, moods, and mental states; to be able to avoid feeling tired, hateful, or irritated about petty things; to have an increased capacity for pleasure, love, artistic appreciation, and serenity; to experience novel states of consciousness that current human brains cannot access. [8]
Though the movement is far from mainstream, its numbers are growing. One transhumanist organization, Humanity+, claims to have approximately 6000 followers. These numbers include both members and newsletter subscribers. Furthermore, Humanity+ bills itself as an international nonprofit membership organization with followers from over 100 countries. Humanity+ adopted the Transhumanist Declaration, a the result of a joint effort between members of Extropy Institute, World Transhumanist Association, and other transhumanist groups worldwide.
Transhumanism as Cosmology
Transhumanism must be recognized for what it is, a rival and alternatives to biblical teaching. Let’s briefly examine the major doctrines of transhumanism.
Transhumanist anthropology
Back in 1990, Max Moore taught that transhumanism was a tool of evolution, a philosophy that aims to accelerate the development of “intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values.” [9] On Whatistranshumanism.org it is admitted that “The human desire to acquire posthuman attributes is as ancient as the human species itself.”[10] The great irony in this is its twisted truth. Humanity has in fact been seeking “posthuman” attributes since the Garden of Eden, when Satan first uttered to Eve “You will be as God” (Gen. 3:5)
How is this “transhumanizing” to be accomplished? By “making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”[11]A biblical view of humanity sees the human race as created good, fallen, and in Christ is redeemed, morally renewed, and on its way to permanent glorification in the New Heavens and Earth. Christians look at humanity now and see, apart from the transformative power of the Holy Spirit, a rebellious image-bearer of God. Transhumanists likewise do not see humans as what they should be. “The human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.”[12] And whereas Christians see the cultural mandate to wisely steward creation as coming from God (Gen. 1:28), transhumanism sees this in terms of technological mastery over our environment:
One could say that manipulating nature is an important part of what civilization and human intelligence is all about; we have been doing it since the invention of the wheel. Alternatively, one could say that since we are part of nature, everything we do and create is in a sense natural too.[13]
Transhumanist harmatiology and soteriology According to transhumanism what is the chief problem with humanity? It is human finitude. Unlike the Bible, which anchors the fall of man in our moral rebellion against our glorious Creator, transhumanism sees human limitedness and physical frailty as the main problems to be overcome. Our determination of human normalcy (what is expected of the human experience in terms of physiological performance, cognitive abilities, and life-span) has not kept up with the modern technological and scientific advances. We need technologically, biologically, and ethically, to get with the program. To state the contrast again, whereas the Bible sees the problem as a broken relationship with God (a moral issue), transhumanism locates the problem with our limitedness or being (an ontological issue).
Salvation is offered through “radical technological modifications” [14] which would include “advocates the use of technologies that intervene with human physiology including nanotechnology, nanomedicine, biotechnology, genetic engineering, stem cell cloning, and transgenesis.”[15] This kind of extreme human updating is a must because the steps required to take us to the posthuman phase of development are too profound to be achievable by merely altering some aspect of psychological theory or the way we think about ourselves.”[16]
Transhumanist eschatology
The endgame for transhumanism, is the attainment of post-human status. Reaching this may mean jettisoning our “bodies altogether and live as information patterns on vast super-fast computer networks. [17] Once thinks of the 2014 film Transcendence to get an idea of what this could look like. Here we would reach a point in (post)human history where “death shall be no more” (Cf. Rev. 21:4). This would mean that “possible future beings” might very well be “no longer unambiguously human by our current standards”[18] or even that “The boundaries between posthuman minds may not be as sharply defined as those between humans”[19] Here we run into a common Oneist theme, not merely blurring the distinct between God and creation, but also the blurring of distinctions within creation.
The Twoist Alternative
All this makes for a new kind of secularized Gnosticism in which the integrity of our bodily existence is relativized, a mere obstacle in the way of our truest redemption, a liberation for the limitation of creatureliness. But, as the church father Irenaeus (approx. 130-202 AD) taught against the Gnostics of his day, creaturely limitedness is not a bad thing, not something to be overcome by transcending the body. It was God’s idea. It was his design to determine humanity’s” allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26) and to call it all “very good” (Gen. 1:31).
In theological language, the fall is ethical, not metaphysical. Once a transcendent-yet-personal Creator God is rejected (as in all Oneist systems), the problems of human experience are always found in some aspect or principle of the finite universe. But since in the Bible, the most ultimate reality is a Person (God), we learn that what is broken isn’t our created nature as humans, it’s our relationship with God. A focus on the wrong problem leads to a wrong solution. Biblical truth also affirms that the frailty of our bodies and the entropy of our world signal a need for transformation. As Paul put it, the creation (which certainly includes us) has been “subjected to futility,” and that it creation groans (Rom. 8:22-24). On this, Christianity and tranhumanism agree: The breakdown of our bodies signals the need for newness, a transcending of our current state.
But unlike transhumanism, and in line with the radical approach of Paul himself, Christians see our physical breakdown as a sign, a signal of humanity’s estrangement from our Creator. Falleness, not finitude, is what needs transcending, and that will only come about by Spirit’s final comic revealing of the sons of God- those who belong to God by adoption through the reconciling work of Jesus Christ.
[1] “What is Transhumanism?” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-transhuman
Accessed 9/917
[2] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at https://christandpopculture.com/the-coming-ethical-conundrums-of-transhumanism/ Accessed 9/917
[3] http://read.christandpopculture.com/issue/57219067ada6e22ac9d18359/for_the_humans_and_transhumans_among_us
[4] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-transhuman
accessed 9/917
[5] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-transhuman
accessed 9/917
[6] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-transhuman
accessed 9/917
[7] http://humanityplus.org/about/mission/. Accessed 9/917
[8] What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-posthuman accessed 9/917
[9] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at whatistranshumanism.org accessed 9/9/17
[10] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-are-the-philosophical-and-cultural-antecedents-of-transhumanism Accessed 9/917
[11] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at whatistranshumanism.org accessed 9/9/17
[12] Ibid.
[13] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#isnt-this-tampering-with-nature
Accessed 9/917
[14] “What is Transhumanism?,” found at http://whatistranshumanism.org/#what-is-a-posthuman accessed 9/917
[15] http://humanityplus.org/about/mission/. Accessed 9/917
[16] “What is Transhumanism?”
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
Orthodoxy of the Heart
by Hieromonk Damascene
And this commandment have we from Him, That he who loveth God love his brother also. —I John 4:21
As Fr. Seraphim developed into a man of the heart, the thrust of his mission developed accordingly. When he had begun his missionary work, he had placed emphasis on upholding true Orthodoxy, on taking a stand against modernism, renovationism, ecumenism. This may have been fine at a beginning stage. As he himself said, “The more one finds out about Christian doctrine and practice, the more one discovers how many ‘mistakes’ one has been making up to now, and one’s natural desire is to be ‘correct.’ [1] But all this is only on the external level, as Fr. Seraphim came to see more clearly as the years went by. He never changed his basic, original philosophy; he was no closer to becoming an ecumenist, modernist, or a New Calendarist at the end of his life than he had been when he had first started printing The Orthodox Word. It was just that now, especially after witnessing the bitter fruits of “correctness disease” in the Church, he saw that there was something much more essential that he should be preaching in these last times, when “the love of many grows cold.”*
Above all, Fr. Seraphim became a preacher of Orthodoxy of the heart. Besides the resurrection of Holy Russia (of which more will be said later), this was his main theme during the last part of his life.
“True Christianity,” he stated in a lecture, “does not mean just having the right opinions about Christianity—this is not enough to save one’s soul. St. Tikhon (of Zadonsk) says: ‘If someone should say that true faith is the correct holding and confession of correct dogmas, he would be telling the truth, for a believer absolutely needs the Orthodox holding and confession of dogmas. But this knowledge and confession by itself does not make a man a faithful and true Christian. The keeping and confession of Orthodox dogmas is always to be found in true faith in Christ, but the true faith of Christ is not always to be found in the confession of Orthodoxy.... The knowledge of correct dogmas is in the mind, and it is often fruitless, arrogant, and proud.... The true faith in Christ is in the heart, and it is fruitful, humble, patient, loving, merciful, compassionate, hungering and thirsting for righteousness; it withdraws from worldly lusts and clings to God alone, strives and seeks always for what is heavenly and eternal, struggles against every sin, and constantly seeks and begs help from God for this.’ And he then quotes Blessed Augustine, who teaches: ‘The faith of a Christian is with love; faith without love is that of the devil.’ [2] St. James in his Epistle tells us that the demons also believe and tremble (James 2:19).
“St. Tikhon, therefore, gives us a start in understanding what Orthodoxy is: it is something first of all of the heart, not just the mind, something living and warm, not abstract and cold, something that is learned and practiced in life, not just in school.” [3]
To give his fellow Orthodox a deeper sense of heartfelt Christianity, Fr. Seraphim brought up the example of Gospel Outreach, the Protestant group out of which Mary, Solomonia, and others had come. While rejecting Protestant errors just as he had ever done, he was able to go beyond the perspective of his early period of negation, to see beneath the externals to the heart of these people’s strivings.
“These Protestants,” he said, “have a simple and warm Christian faith without much of the sectarian narrowness that characterizes many Protestant groups. They don’t believe, like some Protestants, that they are ‘saved’ and don’t need to do any more; they believe in the idea of spiritual struggle and training the soul. They force themselves to forgive each other and not to hold grudges. They take in bums and hippies off the streets and have a special farm for rehabilitating them and teaching them a sense of responsibility. In other words, they take Christianity seriously as the most important thing in life; it’s not the fullness of Christianity that we Orthodox have, but it’s good as far as it goes, and these people are warm, loving people who obviously love Christ. In this way they are an example of what we should be, only more so....
“Some of our Orthodox young people are converted to groups like this, but it works the other way around also—some of these Protestants are being converted to Orthodoxy. And why not? If we have the true Christianity, there should be something in our midst that someone who sincerely loves the truth will see and want. We’ve baptized several people from this Protestant group in our monastery; they are drawn to Orthodoxy by the grace and the sacraments whose presence they feel in Orthodoxy, but which are absent in their group. And once they become Orthodox, they find their Protestant experience, which seemed so real to them at the time, to be quite shallow and superficial. Their leaders give very practical teachings based on the Gospel, but after a while the teachings are exhausted and they repeat themselves. Coming to Orthodoxy, these converts find a wealth of teaching that is inexhaustible and leads them into a depth of Christian experience that is totally beyond even the best of non-Orthodox Christians. We who are already Orthodox have this treasure and this depth right in front of us, and we must use it more fully than we usually do.”[4]
Fr. Seraphim spoke along similar lines about those who were converting to Orthodoxy in Africa. Since the 1960s he had followed the Orthodox mission in Africa with great interest, writing and publishing articles about African converts to Orthodoxy, corresponding with them, and sending them clothes, supplies, Bibles, and The Orthodox Word.[5] He was deeply moved by the letters he received from Africa, seeing in them a simple piety and a warm love for Jesus Christ and the Church that he felt could be instructive to over-complicated people of the West. In one talk he said: “During the last
fifty years there has been a tremendous movement of conversion of people to Orthodoxy in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and now the Congo and other countries. They often write to us at The Orthodox Word the simplest kind of letters, very evangelical, about rejoicing in the Lord. They are very, very pious and faithful to Orthodoxy. It is just such simple-hearted people that Christ wants, and it is such people who are coming into the Orthodox Church now.”[6]
In another talk Fr. Seraphim spoke more about some of the letters he received: “They are very touching letters from African boys who are converted to Orthodoxy. They have the utmost respect for their bishop. They go to seminary. It is obvious that a very Orthodox feeling is being given to these people in Africa. If simple people are preached the Orthodox Gospel, they respond now in the same way that they have always responded in the past. The problem is, rather, with complicated people.”[7]
In preaching inward Orthodoxy of the heart, Fr. Seraphim warned against being calculating and critical. He identified this as the temptation of following “external wisdom.” “Sometimes,” he said, “one’s zeal for ‘Orthodoxy’ (in quotes) can be so excessive that it produces a situation similar to that which caused an old Russian woman** to remark about an enthusiastic American convert: ‘Well, he’s certainly Orthodox, all right—but is he a Christian?’ To be ‘Orthodox but not Christian’ is a state that has a particular name in Christian language: it means to be a pharisee, to be so bogged down in the letter of the Church’s laws that one loses the spirit that gives them life, the spirit of true Christianity.”[8]
Fr. Seraphim pointed out how we can get carried away with “correctness” even in small ways: “We can like well-done Byzantine icons (which is a good thing), but we go too far if we are disdainful of the more modern-style icons which are still in many of our churches. The same goes for church singing, architecture, the following of correct rules of fasting, of kneeling in church, etc....[9]
“If you get all excited about having the right kind of icons and begin saying, ‘There’s an icon of the wrong style in our church!’ you have to be very careful, because you’re placing all your emphasis on something external. In fact, if there is a church with nothing but good-style icons, I’m suspicious of it, because maybe [the people there] are just following the fashion. There is a case (one of many) in which a church had old, original Russian icons—some good and some in rather poor taste, painted in a relatively new style—and a zealous person took them all out and put in new, paper icon prints in perfect Byzantine style. And what was the result? The people there lost contact with tradition, with the people who gave them Orthodoxy. They removed the original icons which believers had prayed before for centuries.”[10]
Fr. Herman recalls how, when he and Fr. Seraphim were first honoring the memory of Fr. Gerasim in The Orthodox Word in the early 1970s, he had expressed his reservations to his co-laborer. “How can we present Fr. Gerasim as a modern giant of traditional Orthodoxy,” Fr. Herman asked, “when he had those nineteenth-century Western-style icons in his church?”
“Those very icons,” Fr. Seraphim replied, ”prove that he was in the tradition, because he accepted simply and lovingly what was handed down to him from his righteous fathers in the Faith.”
Fr. Seraphim also observed how we can be following “external wisdom” when we get caught up in exalted ideas: “It is the fashion now to learn about the Jesus Prayer, to read the Philokalia, to go ‘back to the Fathers.’ These kinds of things also will not save us—they are external. They may be helpful if they are used rightly, but if they become your passion, the first thing you are after, then they become externals which lead not to Christ, but to Antichrist.”[11]
Fr. Seraphim was one with the nineteenth-century prophet St. Ignatius Brianchaninov in teaching that only those who feel the Kingdom of God in their own hearts will be able to recognize the true nature of Antichrist when he comes. By contrast, Fr. Seraphim stated that “the ‘super-Orthodox’ of today can very easily become the prey of Antichrist.” In a few places he told how this might happen: “Vladimir Soloviev, in his ‘Short Story of Antichrist,’ ingeniously suggests that Antichrist, in order to attract Orthodox conservatives, will open a museum of all Christian antiquities. Perhaps the very images of Antichrist himself (Apoc. 13:14) will be in good Byzantine style—this should be a sobering thought for us.
“The Antichrist must be understood as a spiritual phenomenon. Why will everyone in the world want to bow down to him? Obviously, it is because there is something in him which responds to something in us—that something being a lack of Christ in us. If we will bow down to him (God forbid that we do so!), it will be because we will feel an attraction to some kind of external thing, which might even look like Christianity, since ‘Antichrist’ means the one who is ‘in place of Christ’ or looks like Christ.”[12]
In particular, Fr. Seraphim saw in the unwarranted “Orthodox” attack on Blessed Augustine a sign of the externalism that will lead to acceptance of Antichrist. Augustine’s “overly logical” doctrines, of which Fr. Seraphim himself said he was “no great admirer,” were only the external, intellectual aspect of a man whose heart was clearly Orthodox. As Fr. Seraphim wrote in a letter, “The one main lovable and Orthodox thing about him is his Orthodox feeling, piety, love for Christ, which comes out so strongly in his non-dogmatic works like his Confessions (the Russian Fathers also love the Soliloquies). To destroy Augustine, as today’s critics are trying to do, is to help to destroy also this piety and love for Christ.... I myself fear the cold hearts of the ‘intellectually correct’ much more than any errors you might find in Augustine. I sense in these cold hearts a preparation for the work of Antichrist (whose imitation of Christ must also extend to ‘correct theology’!); I feel in Augustine the love of Christ.”[13]
Over and over again, Fr. Seraphim counseled his fellow Orthodox Christians to have love and compassion for the suffering. “There are the daily opportunities for expressing Christian love,” he said: “giving alms, visiting the sick, helping those in need.”
Frequently Fr. Seraphim commented on the danger of making Orthodoxy into a “style” while at the same time overlooking one’s most basic duties as a Christian. In one talk he said: “Do we perhaps boast that we keep the fasts and the Church calendar, have ‘good icons’ and ‘congregational singing,’ that we give to the poor and perhaps tithe to the Church? Do we delight in exalted Patristic teachings and theological discussions without having in our hearts the simplicity of Christ and true compassion for the suffering?—then ours is a ‘spirituality with comfort,’ and we will not have the spiritual fruits that will be exhibited by those without all these ‘comforts’ who deeply suffer and struggle for Christ.”[14]
In 1979, when speaking about Archbishop Andrew (formerly Fr. Adrian) of New Diveyevo, who had reposed the year before, Fr. Seraphim said: “He hated the ‘hothouse’ Christianity of those who ‘enjoy’ being Orthodox but don’t live a life of struggling and deepening their Christianity. We converts can easily fall for this ‘hothouse’ Orthodoxy, too. We can live close to a church, have English services, a good priest, go frequently to church and receive the Sacraments, be in the ‘correct’ jurisdiction—and still be cold, unfeeling, arrogant and proud, as St. Tikhon of Zadonsk has said.”
In the same talk, Fr. Seraphim spoke on how one can try to be “spiritual” while neglecting basic Christian love: “Our spiritual life is not something bookish or that follows formulas. Everything we learn has to become part of our life and something natural to us. We can be reading about hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer, for example, and begin to say it ourselves—and still be blind to our own passions and unresponsive to a person in need right in front of us, not seeing that this is a test of our Christianity that comes at a more basic level than saying the Jesus Prayer.”[15]
“Wherever you are in your spiritual life,” Fr. Seraphim counseled, “you are to begin right there to take part in the life of the Church, to offer struggles to God, to love each other, to become aware of the people around you, to see that you are responsible for them, for being at least kind and cheerful, trying to do good deeds. You are to be aware of the unhappiness of others, to cheer them up and help them out. All of these things promote the life of grace in the Church.”[16]
Such was Fr. Seraphim’s counsel on showing Christian love through outward actions—counsel which, as we have seen, he first put into practice himself. But he also spoke about giving love to others in a way that was not shown outwardly, that is, through praying for them. Here again his counsel was born out of his own experience, as he prayed daily for people in the silence of his heart and the solitude of his cell. He prayed not only for those close to him, but also for people throughout the world whom he knew about, especially those he knew were suffering.
In 1981, when an Orthodox priest asked Fr. Seraphim about the role of prayer in the life of a monk, Fr. Seraphim emphasized the monk’s duty to pray for others, and ultimately for the whole world. “A monk,” he said, “is free to pray more than the ordinary layman is able to, because the whole monastic life is centered around the Church services, which we have in the morning, in the evening, and at various other times of the day. Therefore, he prays with the cycle of the Church’s services. And a special part of his prayer is the prayer, both in church and in his own cell, for others. In the world, people are not usually so free to devote time to praying for others; but the monastic has the opportunity to devote himself to this kind of prayer. In his prayer in the desert, away from the ways of the world, he can call to mind those who are in various conditions of suffering, sorrows, or struggles. Often those people in the world have no one to have sympathy on them in their struggles. The monastic is one who can do this. We receive mail from people all over the world telling about their needs and their struggles, and therefore we take this obligation upon ourselves of praying for them, asking God’s mercy upon all those who are in conditions of need throughout the world.”[17]
In the Orthodox understanding of monastic life, a monk on leaving the world does not at all cease having love and concern for the world, nor does he cease to labor for it. His love and his labor for the world are expressed in his prayer for it. He actually helps to sustain the world through his prayers.
Fr. Seraphim took seriously his monastic duty of praying for the world. With this in mind, he made it a point to keep abreast with the plight of suffering people all over the world, especially those who live under Communist and totalitarian Muslim regimes. In his talk at the 1979 St. Herman Pilgrimage, “Orthodox Christians Facing the 1980s,” he tried to make people aware of the tremendous suffering that was occurring in the world around them, from the drowning of thousands of Southeast Asian “boat people” to the extermination of one-quarter of the population of Cambodia under the Communist dictator Pol Pot. During the same lecture he read a moving letter which he had received from an Orthodox Christian in Degeya, Uganda, where the people had just come out from under the regime of the Muslim dictator Idi Amin.*** As the letter made clear, Idi Amin’s regime had been ruthlessly persecuting Christians, killing priests and believers, closing or bombing their churches, and changing Sunday services to Friday (the Muslim holy day). Fr. Seraphim did not neglect to draw a comparison between this Muslim dictatorship and Communist totalitarianism. “It’s frightful,” he remarked. “There are pictures of Idi Amin’s torture chambers, just like under Communism. But Idi Amin did this in his own name in order to make Islam the religion of Uganda.”****
Even though monastics have a greater responsibility to pray for the world because of their greater opportunity, Fr. Seraphim made clear that this duty is common to all Christians. In his talks he counseled monastics and laypeople alike to go throughout the world in their minds, praying for those who were struggling and suffering. He especially asked them to pray for Christians who were being persecuted for their faith.
There can be no doubt that Fr. Seraphim’s preaching of Orthodoxy of the heart came out of a deepening of his prayer life, and out of a corresponding deepening of what he called “the essential experience of pain of heart.”[18] Elder Paisios, a revered spiritual father who reposed recently on Mount Athos, has well described the experience of prayer with pain for other people which Fr. Seraphim entered into, and to which he called others. “Prayer which is not from the heart,” said Elder Paisios, “but is made only by the mind, doesn’t go any further. To pray with the heart, we must hurt. Just as when we hit our hand or some other part of our body our nous (spirit) is gathered to the point we are hurting, so also for the nous to gather in the heart, the heart must hurt.
“We should make the other’s pain our own! We must love the other, must hurt for him, so that we can pray for him. We must come out, little by little, from our own self and begin to love, to hurt for other people as well, for our family first and then for the large family of Adam, of God.”[19]
Fr. Seraphim’s love for others, expressed in his outward deeds and in his inward prayer, was both the means and the evidence of his going deeper into the Orthodox Christian Faith. As our Lord Jesus Christ has said, By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples: if ye have love one to another (John 13:35). Fr. Seraphim had truly been granted the prayer he had brought before the Mother of God in 1961, when he had asked her to let him enter “the heart of hearts” of the saving Faith of Christ. At the heart of true Christianity, he had found that on which hang all the law and the prophets (Matt. 22:40): love for God, and love for one’s neighbor. It was the first and second commandment of the incarnate God—of Him Who made of Love a law.
by Hieromonk Damascene
And this commandment have we from Him, That he who loveth God love his brother also. —I John 4:21
As Fr. Seraphim developed into a man of the heart, the thrust of his mission developed accordingly. When he had begun his missionary work, he had placed emphasis on upholding true Orthodoxy, on taking a stand against modernism, renovationism, ecumenism. This may have been fine at a beginning stage. As he himself said, “The more one finds out about Christian doctrine and practice, the more one discovers how many ‘mistakes’ one has been making up to now, and one’s natural desire is to be ‘correct.’ [1] But all this is only on the external level, as Fr. Seraphim came to see more clearly as the years went by. He never changed his basic, original philosophy; he was no closer to becoming an ecumenist, modernist, or a New Calendarist at the end of his life than he had been when he had first started printing The Orthodox Word. It was just that now, especially after witnessing the bitter fruits of “correctness disease” in the Church, he saw that there was something much more essential that he should be preaching in these last times, when “the love of many grows cold.”*
Above all, Fr. Seraphim became a preacher of Orthodoxy of the heart. Besides the resurrection of Holy Russia (of which more will be said later), this was his main theme during the last part of his life.
“True Christianity,” he stated in a lecture, “does not mean just having the right opinions about Christianity—this is not enough to save one’s soul. St. Tikhon (of Zadonsk) says: ‘If someone should say that true faith is the correct holding and confession of correct dogmas, he would be telling the truth, for a believer absolutely needs the Orthodox holding and confession of dogmas. But this knowledge and confession by itself does not make a man a faithful and true Christian. The keeping and confession of Orthodox dogmas is always to be found in true faith in Christ, but the true faith of Christ is not always to be found in the confession of Orthodoxy.... The knowledge of correct dogmas is in the mind, and it is often fruitless, arrogant, and proud.... The true faith in Christ is in the heart, and it is fruitful, humble, patient, loving, merciful, compassionate, hungering and thirsting for righteousness; it withdraws from worldly lusts and clings to God alone, strives and seeks always for what is heavenly and eternal, struggles against every sin, and constantly seeks and begs help from God for this.’ And he then quotes Blessed Augustine, who teaches: ‘The faith of a Christian is with love; faith without love is that of the devil.’ [2] St. James in his Epistle tells us that the demons also believe and tremble (James 2:19).
“St. Tikhon, therefore, gives us a start in understanding what Orthodoxy is: it is something first of all of the heart, not just the mind, something living and warm, not abstract and cold, something that is learned and practiced in life, not just in school.” [3]
To give his fellow Orthodox a deeper sense of heartfelt Christianity, Fr. Seraphim brought up the example of Gospel Outreach, the Protestant group out of which Mary, Solomonia, and others had come. While rejecting Protestant errors just as he had ever done, he was able to go beyond the perspective of his early period of negation, to see beneath the externals to the heart of these people’s strivings.
“These Protestants,” he said, “have a simple and warm Christian faith without much of the sectarian narrowness that characterizes many Protestant groups. They don’t believe, like some Protestants, that they are ‘saved’ and don’t need to do any more; they believe in the idea of spiritual struggle and training the soul. They force themselves to forgive each other and not to hold grudges. They take in bums and hippies off the streets and have a special farm for rehabilitating them and teaching them a sense of responsibility. In other words, they take Christianity seriously as the most important thing in life; it’s not the fullness of Christianity that we Orthodox have, but it’s good as far as it goes, and these people are warm, loving people who obviously love Christ. In this way they are an example of what we should be, only more so....
“Some of our Orthodox young people are converted to groups like this, but it works the other way around also—some of these Protestants are being converted to Orthodoxy. And why not? If we have the true Christianity, there should be something in our midst that someone who sincerely loves the truth will see and want. We’ve baptized several people from this Protestant group in our monastery; they are drawn to Orthodoxy by the grace and the sacraments whose presence they feel in Orthodoxy, but which are absent in their group. And once they become Orthodox, they find their Protestant experience, which seemed so real to them at the time, to be quite shallow and superficial. Their leaders give very practical teachings based on the Gospel, but after a while the teachings are exhausted and they repeat themselves. Coming to Orthodoxy, these converts find a wealth of teaching that is inexhaustible and leads them into a depth of Christian experience that is totally beyond even the best of non-Orthodox Christians. We who are already Orthodox have this treasure and this depth right in front of us, and we must use it more fully than we usually do.”[4]
Fr. Seraphim spoke along similar lines about those who were converting to Orthodoxy in Africa. Since the 1960s he had followed the Orthodox mission in Africa with great interest, writing and publishing articles about African converts to Orthodoxy, corresponding with them, and sending them clothes, supplies, Bibles, and The Orthodox Word.[5] He was deeply moved by the letters he received from Africa, seeing in them a simple piety and a warm love for Jesus Christ and the Church that he felt could be instructive to over-complicated people of the West. In one talk he said: “During the last
fifty years there has been a tremendous movement of conversion of people to Orthodoxy in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and now the Congo and other countries. They often write to us at The Orthodox Word the simplest kind of letters, very evangelical, about rejoicing in the Lord. They are very, very pious and faithful to Orthodoxy. It is just such simple-hearted people that Christ wants, and it is such people who are coming into the Orthodox Church now.”[6]
In another talk Fr. Seraphim spoke more about some of the letters he received: “They are very touching letters from African boys who are converted to Orthodoxy. They have the utmost respect for their bishop. They go to seminary. It is obvious that a very Orthodox feeling is being given to these people in Africa. If simple people are preached the Orthodox Gospel, they respond now in the same way that they have always responded in the past. The problem is, rather, with complicated people.”[7]
In preaching inward Orthodoxy of the heart, Fr. Seraphim warned against being calculating and critical. He identified this as the temptation of following “external wisdom.” “Sometimes,” he said, “one’s zeal for ‘Orthodoxy’ (in quotes) can be so excessive that it produces a situation similar to that which caused an old Russian woman** to remark about an enthusiastic American convert: ‘Well, he’s certainly Orthodox, all right—but is he a Christian?’ To be ‘Orthodox but not Christian’ is a state that has a particular name in Christian language: it means to be a pharisee, to be so bogged down in the letter of the Church’s laws that one loses the spirit that gives them life, the spirit of true Christianity.”[8]
Fr. Seraphim pointed out how we can get carried away with “correctness” even in small ways: “We can like well-done Byzantine icons (which is a good thing), but we go too far if we are disdainful of the more modern-style icons which are still in many of our churches. The same goes for church singing, architecture, the following of correct rules of fasting, of kneeling in church, etc....[9]
“If you get all excited about having the right kind of icons and begin saying, ‘There’s an icon of the wrong style in our church!’ you have to be very careful, because you’re placing all your emphasis on something external. In fact, if there is a church with nothing but good-style icons, I’m suspicious of it, because maybe [the people there] are just following the fashion. There is a case (one of many) in which a church had old, original Russian icons—some good and some in rather poor taste, painted in a relatively new style—and a zealous person took them all out and put in new, paper icon prints in perfect Byzantine style. And what was the result? The people there lost contact with tradition, with the people who gave them Orthodoxy. They removed the original icons which believers had prayed before for centuries.”[10]
Fr. Herman recalls how, when he and Fr. Seraphim were first honoring the memory of Fr. Gerasim in The Orthodox Word in the early 1970s, he had expressed his reservations to his co-laborer. “How can we present Fr. Gerasim as a modern giant of traditional Orthodoxy,” Fr. Herman asked, “when he had those nineteenth-century Western-style icons in his church?”
“Those very icons,” Fr. Seraphim replied, ”prove that he was in the tradition, because he accepted simply and lovingly what was handed down to him from his righteous fathers in the Faith.”
Fr. Seraphim also observed how we can be following “external wisdom” when we get caught up in exalted ideas: “It is the fashion now to learn about the Jesus Prayer, to read the Philokalia, to go ‘back to the Fathers.’ These kinds of things also will not save us—they are external. They may be helpful if they are used rightly, but if they become your passion, the first thing you are after, then they become externals which lead not to Christ, but to Antichrist.”[11]
Fr. Seraphim was one with the nineteenth-century prophet St. Ignatius Brianchaninov in teaching that only those who feel the Kingdom of God in their own hearts will be able to recognize the true nature of Antichrist when he comes. By contrast, Fr. Seraphim stated that “the ‘super-Orthodox’ of today can very easily become the prey of Antichrist.” In a few places he told how this might happen: “Vladimir Soloviev, in his ‘Short Story of Antichrist,’ ingeniously suggests that Antichrist, in order to attract Orthodox conservatives, will open a museum of all Christian antiquities. Perhaps the very images of Antichrist himself (Apoc. 13:14) will be in good Byzantine style—this should be a sobering thought for us.
“The Antichrist must be understood as a spiritual phenomenon. Why will everyone in the world want to bow down to him? Obviously, it is because there is something in him which responds to something in us—that something being a lack of Christ in us. If we will bow down to him (God forbid that we do so!), it will be because we will feel an attraction to some kind of external thing, which might even look like Christianity, since ‘Antichrist’ means the one who is ‘in place of Christ’ or looks like Christ.”[12]
In particular, Fr. Seraphim saw in the unwarranted “Orthodox” attack on Blessed Augustine a sign of the externalism that will lead to acceptance of Antichrist. Augustine’s “overly logical” doctrines, of which Fr. Seraphim himself said he was “no great admirer,” were only the external, intellectual aspect of a man whose heart was clearly Orthodox. As Fr. Seraphim wrote in a letter, “The one main lovable and Orthodox thing about him is his Orthodox feeling, piety, love for Christ, which comes out so strongly in his non-dogmatic works like his Confessions (the Russian Fathers also love the Soliloquies). To destroy Augustine, as today’s critics are trying to do, is to help to destroy also this piety and love for Christ.... I myself fear the cold hearts of the ‘intellectually correct’ much more than any errors you might find in Augustine. I sense in these cold hearts a preparation for the work of Antichrist (whose imitation of Christ must also extend to ‘correct theology’!); I feel in Augustine the love of Christ.”[13]
Over and over again, Fr. Seraphim counseled his fellow Orthodox Christians to have love and compassion for the suffering. “There are the daily opportunities for expressing Christian love,” he said: “giving alms, visiting the sick, helping those in need.”
Frequently Fr. Seraphim commented on the danger of making Orthodoxy into a “style” while at the same time overlooking one’s most basic duties as a Christian. In one talk he said: “Do we perhaps boast that we keep the fasts and the Church calendar, have ‘good icons’ and ‘congregational singing,’ that we give to the poor and perhaps tithe to the Church? Do we delight in exalted Patristic teachings and theological discussions without having in our hearts the simplicity of Christ and true compassion for the suffering?—then ours is a ‘spirituality with comfort,’ and we will not have the spiritual fruits that will be exhibited by those without all these ‘comforts’ who deeply suffer and struggle for Christ.”[14]
In 1979, when speaking about Archbishop Andrew (formerly Fr. Adrian) of New Diveyevo, who had reposed the year before, Fr. Seraphim said: “He hated the ‘hothouse’ Christianity of those who ‘enjoy’ being Orthodox but don’t live a life of struggling and deepening their Christianity. We converts can easily fall for this ‘hothouse’ Orthodoxy, too. We can live close to a church, have English services, a good priest, go frequently to church and receive the Sacraments, be in the ‘correct’ jurisdiction—and still be cold, unfeeling, arrogant and proud, as St. Tikhon of Zadonsk has said.”
In the same talk, Fr. Seraphim spoke on how one can try to be “spiritual” while neglecting basic Christian love: “Our spiritual life is not something bookish or that follows formulas. Everything we learn has to become part of our life and something natural to us. We can be reading about hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer, for example, and begin to say it ourselves—and still be blind to our own passions and unresponsive to a person in need right in front of us, not seeing that this is a test of our Christianity that comes at a more basic level than saying the Jesus Prayer.”[15]
“Wherever you are in your spiritual life,” Fr. Seraphim counseled, “you are to begin right there to take part in the life of the Church, to offer struggles to God, to love each other, to become aware of the people around you, to see that you are responsible for them, for being at least kind and cheerful, trying to do good deeds. You are to be aware of the unhappiness of others, to cheer them up and help them out. All of these things promote the life of grace in the Church.”[16]
Such was Fr. Seraphim’s counsel on showing Christian love through outward actions—counsel which, as we have seen, he first put into practice himself. But he also spoke about giving love to others in a way that was not shown outwardly, that is, through praying for them. Here again his counsel was born out of his own experience, as he prayed daily for people in the silence of his heart and the solitude of his cell. He prayed not only for those close to him, but also for people throughout the world whom he knew about, especially those he knew were suffering.
In 1981, when an Orthodox priest asked Fr. Seraphim about the role of prayer in the life of a monk, Fr. Seraphim emphasized the monk’s duty to pray for others, and ultimately for the whole world. “A monk,” he said, “is free to pray more than the ordinary layman is able to, because the whole monastic life is centered around the Church services, which we have in the morning, in the evening, and at various other times of the day. Therefore, he prays with the cycle of the Church’s services. And a special part of his prayer is the prayer, both in church and in his own cell, for others. In the world, people are not usually so free to devote time to praying for others; but the monastic has the opportunity to devote himself to this kind of prayer. In his prayer in the desert, away from the ways of the world, he can call to mind those who are in various conditions of suffering, sorrows, or struggles. Often those people in the world have no one to have sympathy on them in their struggles. The monastic is one who can do this. We receive mail from people all over the world telling about their needs and their struggles, and therefore we take this obligation upon ourselves of praying for them, asking God’s mercy upon all those who are in conditions of need throughout the world.”[17]
In the Orthodox understanding of monastic life, a monk on leaving the world does not at all cease having love and concern for the world, nor does he cease to labor for it. His love and his labor for the world are expressed in his prayer for it. He actually helps to sustain the world through his prayers.
Fr. Seraphim took seriously his monastic duty of praying for the world. With this in mind, he made it a point to keep abreast with the plight of suffering people all over the world, especially those who live under Communist and totalitarian Muslim regimes. In his talk at the 1979 St. Herman Pilgrimage, “Orthodox Christians Facing the 1980s,” he tried to make people aware of the tremendous suffering that was occurring in the world around them, from the drowning of thousands of Southeast Asian “boat people” to the extermination of one-quarter of the population of Cambodia under the Communist dictator Pol Pot. During the same lecture he read a moving letter which he had received from an Orthodox Christian in Degeya, Uganda, where the people had just come out from under the regime of the Muslim dictator Idi Amin.*** As the letter made clear, Idi Amin’s regime had been ruthlessly persecuting Christians, killing priests and believers, closing or bombing their churches, and changing Sunday services to Friday (the Muslim holy day). Fr. Seraphim did not neglect to draw a comparison between this Muslim dictatorship and Communist totalitarianism. “It’s frightful,” he remarked. “There are pictures of Idi Amin’s torture chambers, just like under Communism. But Idi Amin did this in his own name in order to make Islam the religion of Uganda.”****
Even though monastics have a greater responsibility to pray for the world because of their greater opportunity, Fr. Seraphim made clear that this duty is common to all Christians. In his talks he counseled monastics and laypeople alike to go throughout the world in their minds, praying for those who were struggling and suffering. He especially asked them to pray for Christians who were being persecuted for their faith.
There can be no doubt that Fr. Seraphim’s preaching of Orthodoxy of the heart came out of a deepening of his prayer life, and out of a corresponding deepening of what he called “the essential experience of pain of heart.”[18] Elder Paisios, a revered spiritual father who reposed recently on Mount Athos, has well described the experience of prayer with pain for other people which Fr. Seraphim entered into, and to which he called others. “Prayer which is not from the heart,” said Elder Paisios, “but is made only by the mind, doesn’t go any further. To pray with the heart, we must hurt. Just as when we hit our hand or some other part of our body our nous (spirit) is gathered to the point we are hurting, so also for the nous to gather in the heart, the heart must hurt.
“We should make the other’s pain our own! We must love the other, must hurt for him, so that we can pray for him. We must come out, little by little, from our own self and begin to love, to hurt for other people as well, for our family first and then for the large family of Adam, of God.”[19]
Fr. Seraphim’s love for others, expressed in his outward deeds and in his inward prayer, was both the means and the evidence of his going deeper into the Orthodox Christian Faith. As our Lord Jesus Christ has said, By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples: if ye have love one to another (John 13:35). Fr. Seraphim had truly been granted the prayer he had brought before the Mother of God in 1961, when he had asked her to let him enter “the heart of hearts” of the saving Faith of Christ. At the heart of true Christianity, he had found that on which hang all the law and the prophets (Matt. 22:40): love for God, and love for one’s neighbor. It was the first and second commandment of the incarnate God—of Him Who made of Love a law.
When Fool's Paradise is Lost
By Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of Platina
Perhaps even more, we can learn from the suffering people of Russia and other Communist countries. I don't want to frighten you, but we'd better face the fact that what they're suffering now, or something similar, is probably coming here, and soon. We're living in the last times, Antichrist is close, and what happens in Russia and other countries like it is the normal experience for our times. Here in the West we're living in a fool's paradise which can and probably will soon be lost. Let's start to prepare -- not by storing food or such outward things that some are already doing in America, but with the inward preparation of Orthodox Christians.Have you ever asked yourself, for example, the question how you will survive if you are placed in prison or concentration camp, and especially in the punishment cells of solitary confinement? How are you going to survive? You will go crazy in a very short time if your mind has nothing to occupy itself with. What will you have in your mind? If you are filled with worldly impressions and have nothing spiritual in your mind; if you are just living from day to day without thinking seriously about Christianity and the Church, without becoming aware of what Orthodoxy is, and you are placed in a situation like solitary confinement where there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, no movies to see, just staying in one spot facing four walls -- you will scarcely survive.
The Rumanian Protestant pastor, Richard Wurmbrand, has a tape devoted to this subject which is very interesting. In a crisis situation like that, when all our books and outward props are taken away, we can depend on nothing except what we've acquired within ourselves. He says that all the Bible verses he knew didn't help him much; abstract knowledge of dogmas didn't help much -- what is important is what you have in your soul. You must have Christ in your soul. If He is there, then we Orthodox Christians have a whole program which we could use in prison. We can remember the Orthodox Calendar -- which saints and feasts are commemorated when. We don't have to know the whole Calendar, but from our daily life in the Church we will remember the milestones of the Church year; whatever we have stored up in our hearts and minds will come back to us. Whatever prayers and hymns we know by heart will help us, we will have to sing them every day. You will have to have people to pray for.
The world-wide dispersion of our Russian Church Abroad is ideal for this. You can go over the whole globe in your mind, one country or continent at a time, and pray for those you know, even if you can't think of their names -- bishops and abbesses, parishes and priests both Russian and missionary, the monasteries in the Holy Land, prisoners in Russia and Rumania and other lands under the atheist yoke, the missions in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa where it is very difficult, the monks of Mt. Athos, the suffering Old Calendarists of Greece. The more of these you are aware of and praying for now, the better it will be for you when you have to suffer yourself, the more you will have to take with you into prison.
As Andreyev says, it is "one for all and all for one" -- we are involved in practicing our Christianity in a world that has become atheist, whether or not open persecution is going on.
Icon-painting of the Old Believers, defenders of the Old Russian Orthodoxy
BY MARIUSZ SALWINSKI
The 17th century is embodied in the history of Russian Orthodoxy as the great schism (Russian: Weliki Raskol). In this tense atmosphere, an enhanced understanding of the Second Coming combined with the aim to preserve the Old Orthodoxy of the Fathers. This evolved during a phase of social, cultural and political upheaval from the late Middle Ages into the modern era. The first tsars of the Romanow dynasty [2], Michael Fedorowitsch (1613 - 1645) and Alexej Michailowitsch (1645 - 1676) not only pressed ahead with the political consolidation of the state, but also the reforms of the Russian church. In the year 1652 Nikon the Metropolitan of the see of Novgorod (1652 - 1666) was ordained as Patriarch in a splendid ceremony held at the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow. In his new function, Patriarch Nikon carried out extensive reforms to the church, which ultimately were the reason for the religious split / Raskol of Russian society into the Old Believers and the Reformists in 1663 / 64. [3]
The Reformists advocated the embrace of the Greek-Orthodox tradition and an alignment to other European Orthodox countries; the Old Believers advocated a conscious adherence to old Russia and a reinforcement of sacral tradition on an Old Russian and Byzantine basis.
As defenders of the old "pure" Russian religion, the Old Believers considered the Patriarch to be the personification of Satan and an indication of the coming of the antichrist. In the Greek tradition the advocates of the old rites saw the doom of true orthodoxy.
The year 1667 witnessed the final excommunication and separation of the Old Believers from the patriarchal church. Together with their archpriest Avvakum Pietrowitsch Kondratiev, a bitter rival of Nikon, the dissidents were banned to Siberia and, strictly guarded, were held captive there in trenches. On the 14th April 1682, the archpriest of the Old Believers in Pustosjerks (under Tsar Fiodor Alexejewitsch, 1676 - 1682) was burned. [4] The volatile situation led to a fractionalisation of the Old Believers within their own ranks. One fraction related to direct spiritual leadership by Christ and dispensed with priests (the "priestless"). The second group advocated priesthood. [5] To escape the reprisals and in order to be able to remain true to their faith, the Old Believers settled in the farthest corners of the empire or in other countries. Some of them decided to settle in the isolation of Siberia.
The uprisings of the peasants in Russia at the outset of the 18th century proved advantageous to the waves of emigration. The decrees of Tsar Peter I from the years 1716 and 1721 attempted to prevent the huge numbers of Old Believers leaving the country. [6] The Russian Empresses Anna (1730 - 1740) and Elisabeth (1741 - 1761) were unable to provide a genuine solution to the problem. With the manifesto of 1734 another attempt was made to reinforce the ban on the building of houses of worship for Old Believers. The years between 1761 and 1826 were relatively tolerant in the tsarist state, although the religion of this minority still failed to establish itself further in the state system despite the easing of regulations directly after 1760.
On the 4th December 1762, the Empress Catherine II introduced her decree of re-migration. Under her rule, the religion of the Old Believers still remained officially unrecognised, although she did concede considerable freedom to this splitter group with the effect that the Old Believers were now able to claim certain rights under the state.
In 1782 they were exempted from double tax levies and as from 1785 could take up official positions. Since the Empress also sought a return to religious ground, she issued a ban in 1768 on the construction of further houses of worship. With the decrees issued in 1779 and 1787 Catherine II again— pursuing her policy of the "unique true religion" (Russian: jedinowierije)— encouraged the Old Believers to return to Russia. This particularly affected the regions of the Polish-Russian border area. In the town of Vetka (in today’s Belarus), the structures of everyday life became more anchored and the icon-painting workshops were established, visibly under the influence of the styles from Jaroslavl’, Moscow and elements of the tsarist workshops. In the 19th century under the Tsar Alexander III. (1881 - 1894), the general situation improved for the Old Believers. It was only in the 20th century that significant events altered the history of the Old Believers: in the year 1905 Tsar Nicholas II. (1894 - 1917) gave recognition to the Church of the Old Believers as having equal rights and abolished persecution of the population still living according to old rites [7], estimated at the time to count 20 million people.
After the October revolution in 1917 persecution again reared itself. In fact the Old Believers only managed to attain their rehabilitation in 1971 at the Regional Council of the Orthodox Church in Moscow. At the moment estimates claim about half a million followers of the old Orthodox rites in Russia.
II
The rule of Peter the Great who had initiated far-reaching reforms of state and church [8] is distinctive for the alignment of the Russian way of life to European influences and for the separation of state from church. [9]
Above all, this relates to the appreciation of art of this monarch and his successors. In the decrees from the years 1707 and 1722, Peter I. made a clear distinction between religious painting and profane art, dissolved the workshop settlements at court, and sent his artists to Western Europe to study painting.
Iconographic elements, mostly from the Occident, now came to embellish the painting of icons, subject to the prevailing baroque style. The production of icons in rural areas was strictly monitored and controlled by the bishops of the dioceses. [10] As from then, it was largely the workshops at the Old Believers’ monasteries and the provincial workshops that devoted themselves to the little esteemed Old Russian icon craftsmanship.
The icon painting of the Old Believers merges traditional medieval thought, rural art and the dogmatic and eschatological concept of the end of time ("The time is at hand", Luke 11:28, The Revelation of St. John 1:3; 10:4; 22:7 and 10). Extremely purist and pragmatic in their daily lives, the Old Believers were drawn to attitudes of mannerism in their art with strong imaging and an exaggerated adherence to ritual forms. With this, they underlined their bond with Russian tradition from the old capital of Moscow.
Of note in the paintings from the icon-painting workshops of the Old Believer "painters’ villages" [11] particularly in central Russia, is the abundance of figures in their compositions and the exceptionally delicate, miniature-like precision of technique.
The subtle bright colouring of the predominant reds, greens, blues and earthy yellow nuances is embellished with rich and golden ornamentation. The delight in detail is reflected in a symbolic understanding of the constructions and landscapes depicted. In interior scenes featuring narrative cycles there are elements of Latin. The proportions of the figures are exaggerated in length. There is a love for a picturesque arrangement of robes that enhances the depiction.
In this respect the Belousow brothers have a special status as well as M.J. Dikarev, O. S. Čirikov and V. P. Gur’janow (all from Mstera, a stronghold of the Old Believers). These icon painters engaged in Moscow around 1900 and in the wake of Pan-Slavism, i.e. with the return to Old Russian traditions, they sought to retain and revive Russian icon painting. Likewise worthy of mention from this period is the world famous workshops on the Estonian western bank of Lake Peipus where G. E. Frolov and his pupil P. M. Sofronov practised their craft.
In 1901 a committee was set up to save and preserve the “ancient soul” of the Russian icon; one of its tasks was to place icon painting and its established painting canon under the patronage of Tsar Nicholas II. (1894 - 1917). [12]
III
The religious and social isolation of the Old Believers at the end of the 17th century was the reason for their defensive and introverted culture. However, this did not automatically culminate in any development of the Old Believer style or the Old Believer icon painting school in the sense of distinctive artistic features of their own. It should be remembered that the Old Believers attempted to restrict icon painting to the means that had been defined hitherto in the canon of old pre-reformist rituals. Any "modernity" introduced as a result of the reforms of Nikon were vehemently dismissed. True to Eastern tradition, the depicted image was still seen as supportive of the higher planes of theology.
The exclusion of the Eastern Church from state structures forced the "priestless" groups in particular to re-evaluate the icon. To them, the icons, just like the writings, embodied a direct link back to the pre-reformist church. The icon consequently became a portable, and therefore available, central theological point of reference, ultimately one that was private and domestic, and hence the Sacrament of the Godly.
The leader of the movement, the archpriest Avvakum, describes in the following how the medium of the image takes over the function of the priest:
,,Vor dem Antlitz des Herrn macht die Kerze an, auf dem bereiteten Tisch, während des Gebets, sollte sich ein Gefäß mit Wein, Wasser und dem Leib Christi befinden. Mit Weihrauch sollte man die Bilder und das ganze Haus ausräuchern, dann das umhängende Kreuz küssen und sich vor dem Antlitz des Herrn verbeugen”. [13]
[Before the countenance of the Lord, light the candles, on the prepared table during prayer there should be a vessel with wine, water and the Body of Christ. Smoke out the pictures and the whole house with incense, then kiss the suspended cross and bow before the countenance of the Lord].
The bond of the Old Believers to their old icons defines their writings, which above all are seen as the very creed of their dissention. These are the so-called “Pastoral answers” (1719) and in particular the “Pomeranian answers” (1723). The latter are deemed to be the joint work of the monks from the monastery by the White Sea in the Vyg region under the supervision of Andrej Denisov (1674 - 1730). In the twentieth chapter, the authors of the works make reference to the past resolutions of the "Stoglav Synod", the church council of 1551 [14], to the writings of Simeon from Thessaloniki, († 1429), the resolutions of the VI. Ecumenical Council in Trullo at Constantinople from the year 691 [15] and, exceptionally, to the post-reformist work of the Muscovite Patriarch Joakim “Spiritual grammar”. The work of Patriarch Joakim was admittedly only written in 1690 after the split of the church, yet in old ritualist style it criticised the taking over and spread of western iconography.
The icon paintings of the Old Believers favoured topics that specifically supported their fundamental concepts. These included a great reverence for the old Russian images of the Mother of God, the Archangel Michael as leader of the heavenly hosts (Archistrátegos) and Lord of Souls on the Day of Judgment, as well as the multi-field icons relating to everyday life (particularly with the groups that were not led by priests). [16]
The way in which the Old Believers saw themselves is particularly tangible in the image Christ— the non-sleeping eye (Greek: Anapeson: he who slumbers). In Russia, the image that stands for the suffering and the glory of Christ is known as The Keeper of Israel does not sleep (Psalm 121:4). In this type of depiction, Christ Emmanuel (also Immanuel) is shown as a young man, diagonally, half-sitting, half-lying, floating above the Paradise-like landscape. His feet in the right bottom corner of the picture seem to touch the ground slightly. Above his head, almost central in the composition, the Mother of God inclines from the left in an attitude of intercession. From the right, likewise in bowed posture, the Angel Michael watches over the slumbering figure. In his covered hands he holds the Cross and other tools of the Passion. The eyes of the resting figure are open; the head is turned to rest on the right arm. The figure of Emmanuel is staring far into the horizon and proclaims Paradise and the Passion. The left hand is stretched out along the sumptuously clothed body. It is possible for the image The non-sleeping eye to vary with the three main actors, yet still based on this iconographic fundament.
The image might be enhanced by two angels descending from heaven (cherub and seraph), who are then holding tools of the Passion in their hands. In the heavenly sphere, the benign God the Father appears and below him the Dove of the Holy Spirit. In its place, it is possible for the Trinity from the Old Testament to be depicted. The slumbering figure is sometimes depicted on the tree of life or without any support at all, directly on the ground. It may also be that to His feet, the picture shows the empty tomb and swans. The background may be designed differently. Perhaps only the Garden of Paradise is shown in the lower region of the picture with small rocks, or the background is split threefold: the earth, golden background and clouds in the sky. Some pictures show a clear division: a lower black zone stands for the earth; the remaining upper area decorated with flowers is part of Paradise.
The ideas for this composition are derived from biblical and non-biblical sources. These include the early Christian Nature Book (Greek: Physiologus) with short stories about real and fantasy animals, trees and stones. The anonymous author of the work indulges in the Christian exegesis of the depicted world that is embellished with appropriate quotations from the Bible. Christ is compared with the lion. The eyes of the lion stay open during sleep; his successors are born dead and arise on the third day. In the Old Testament the lion stands for Jahwe. In the Book of Genesis (49:8-9) the lion symbolises anointment by God, the Saviour and Redeemer. In the apocalypse of St. John (5:5) the lion is named as lamb.
Analysis of the works of art from Greece and the Balkan states shows that the aforementioned depiction was positioned at three different optional locations in the temple: in the portico or narthex of the atrium, above the king’s portal, i.e. above the entrance to the sanctuary and in the prothesis (part of the service) chapel. The last positioning in the prothesis chapel leads us directly to the preparatory act for the Eucharistic sacrament. According to Simeon from Thessaloniki, the middle part of the prosphora bread on the diskos stands for the Lamb Christ, the left part for the Mother of God and the right part for angelic hoards and thus corresponds with the arrangement in the picture.
In the old Rus’ region, the image of the non-sleeping eye was already known in the 15th century and it can be assumed that it originated from Serbia and Macedonia. In the period from the 16th to the 18th century, large numbers of icons with this motif were created in Russia. It was celebrated as apotheosis of the Trinity, with particular emphasis— especially with the Old Believers— on the story of the Passion (angels with covered hands cf. depictions of the cross). With our own reflections on the movement of the Old Believers, the depiction of the resting Christ on earth is to be understood as symbolic for the martyrdom on earth in the kingdom of Satan. The act of sleeping is interpreted as tangible perception of death. In the ideology of the Old Believers, the earth was simply a place of despair and estrangement, and for proceeding into eternal life. The depiction “The non-sleeping eye”, that visualizes in its pictorial statement the theological allegory of "The Lord, the Keeper of Israel and Creator of the world does not slumber or sleep, but watches over and preserves his creation" confirms the claim of the Old Believers in naming themselves the "House of Israel", the "New Israel" or the "Gathering of the Children of Israel".
BY MARIUSZ SALWINSKI
The 17th century is embodied in the history of Russian Orthodoxy as the great schism (Russian: Weliki Raskol). In this tense atmosphere, an enhanced understanding of the Second Coming combined with the aim to preserve the Old Orthodoxy of the Fathers. This evolved during a phase of social, cultural and political upheaval from the late Middle Ages into the modern era. The first tsars of the Romanow dynasty [2], Michael Fedorowitsch (1613 - 1645) and Alexej Michailowitsch (1645 - 1676) not only pressed ahead with the political consolidation of the state, but also the reforms of the Russian church. In the year 1652 Nikon the Metropolitan of the see of Novgorod (1652 - 1666) was ordained as Patriarch in a splendid ceremony held at the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow. In his new function, Patriarch Nikon carried out extensive reforms to the church, which ultimately were the reason for the religious split / Raskol of Russian society into the Old Believers and the Reformists in 1663 / 64. [3]
The Reformists advocated the embrace of the Greek-Orthodox tradition and an alignment to other European Orthodox countries; the Old Believers advocated a conscious adherence to old Russia and a reinforcement of sacral tradition on an Old Russian and Byzantine basis.
As defenders of the old "pure" Russian religion, the Old Believers considered the Patriarch to be the personification of Satan and an indication of the coming of the antichrist. In the Greek tradition the advocates of the old rites saw the doom of true orthodoxy.
The year 1667 witnessed the final excommunication and separation of the Old Believers from the patriarchal church. Together with their archpriest Avvakum Pietrowitsch Kondratiev, a bitter rival of Nikon, the dissidents were banned to Siberia and, strictly guarded, were held captive there in trenches. On the 14th April 1682, the archpriest of the Old Believers in Pustosjerks (under Tsar Fiodor Alexejewitsch, 1676 - 1682) was burned. [4] The volatile situation led to a fractionalisation of the Old Believers within their own ranks. One fraction related to direct spiritual leadership by Christ and dispensed with priests (the "priestless"). The second group advocated priesthood. [5] To escape the reprisals and in order to be able to remain true to their faith, the Old Believers settled in the farthest corners of the empire or in other countries. Some of them decided to settle in the isolation of Siberia.
The uprisings of the peasants in Russia at the outset of the 18th century proved advantageous to the waves of emigration. The decrees of Tsar Peter I from the years 1716 and 1721 attempted to prevent the huge numbers of Old Believers leaving the country. [6] The Russian Empresses Anna (1730 - 1740) and Elisabeth (1741 - 1761) were unable to provide a genuine solution to the problem. With the manifesto of 1734 another attempt was made to reinforce the ban on the building of houses of worship for Old Believers. The years between 1761 and 1826 were relatively tolerant in the tsarist state, although the religion of this minority still failed to establish itself further in the state system despite the easing of regulations directly after 1760.
On the 4th December 1762, the Empress Catherine II introduced her decree of re-migration. Under her rule, the religion of the Old Believers still remained officially unrecognised, although she did concede considerable freedom to this splitter group with the effect that the Old Believers were now able to claim certain rights under the state.
In 1782 they were exempted from double tax levies and as from 1785 could take up official positions. Since the Empress also sought a return to religious ground, she issued a ban in 1768 on the construction of further houses of worship. With the decrees issued in 1779 and 1787 Catherine II again— pursuing her policy of the "unique true religion" (Russian: jedinowierije)— encouraged the Old Believers to return to Russia. This particularly affected the regions of the Polish-Russian border area. In the town of Vetka (in today’s Belarus), the structures of everyday life became more anchored and the icon-painting workshops were established, visibly under the influence of the styles from Jaroslavl’, Moscow and elements of the tsarist workshops. In the 19th century under the Tsar Alexander III. (1881 - 1894), the general situation improved for the Old Believers. It was only in the 20th century that significant events altered the history of the Old Believers: in the year 1905 Tsar Nicholas II. (1894 - 1917) gave recognition to the Church of the Old Believers as having equal rights and abolished persecution of the population still living according to old rites [7], estimated at the time to count 20 million people.
After the October revolution in 1917 persecution again reared itself. In fact the Old Believers only managed to attain their rehabilitation in 1971 at the Regional Council of the Orthodox Church in Moscow. At the moment estimates claim about half a million followers of the old Orthodox rites in Russia.
II
The rule of Peter the Great who had initiated far-reaching reforms of state and church [8] is distinctive for the alignment of the Russian way of life to European influences and for the separation of state from church. [9]
Above all, this relates to the appreciation of art of this monarch and his successors. In the decrees from the years 1707 and 1722, Peter I. made a clear distinction between religious painting and profane art, dissolved the workshop settlements at court, and sent his artists to Western Europe to study painting.
Iconographic elements, mostly from the Occident, now came to embellish the painting of icons, subject to the prevailing baroque style. The production of icons in rural areas was strictly monitored and controlled by the bishops of the dioceses. [10] As from then, it was largely the workshops at the Old Believers’ monasteries and the provincial workshops that devoted themselves to the little esteemed Old Russian icon craftsmanship.
The icon painting of the Old Believers merges traditional medieval thought, rural art and the dogmatic and eschatological concept of the end of time ("The time is at hand", Luke 11:28, The Revelation of St. John 1:3; 10:4; 22:7 and 10). Extremely purist and pragmatic in their daily lives, the Old Believers were drawn to attitudes of mannerism in their art with strong imaging and an exaggerated adherence to ritual forms. With this, they underlined their bond with Russian tradition from the old capital of Moscow.
Of note in the paintings from the icon-painting workshops of the Old Believer "painters’ villages" [11] particularly in central Russia, is the abundance of figures in their compositions and the exceptionally delicate, miniature-like precision of technique.
The subtle bright colouring of the predominant reds, greens, blues and earthy yellow nuances is embellished with rich and golden ornamentation. The delight in detail is reflected in a symbolic understanding of the constructions and landscapes depicted. In interior scenes featuring narrative cycles there are elements of Latin. The proportions of the figures are exaggerated in length. There is a love for a picturesque arrangement of robes that enhances the depiction.
In this respect the Belousow brothers have a special status as well as M.J. Dikarev, O. S. Čirikov and V. P. Gur’janow (all from Mstera, a stronghold of the Old Believers). These icon painters engaged in Moscow around 1900 and in the wake of Pan-Slavism, i.e. with the return to Old Russian traditions, they sought to retain and revive Russian icon painting. Likewise worthy of mention from this period is the world famous workshops on the Estonian western bank of Lake Peipus where G. E. Frolov and his pupil P. M. Sofronov practised their craft.
In 1901 a committee was set up to save and preserve the “ancient soul” of the Russian icon; one of its tasks was to place icon painting and its established painting canon under the patronage of Tsar Nicholas II. (1894 - 1917). [12]
III
The religious and social isolation of the Old Believers at the end of the 17th century was the reason for their defensive and introverted culture. However, this did not automatically culminate in any development of the Old Believer style or the Old Believer icon painting school in the sense of distinctive artistic features of their own. It should be remembered that the Old Believers attempted to restrict icon painting to the means that had been defined hitherto in the canon of old pre-reformist rituals. Any "modernity" introduced as a result of the reforms of Nikon were vehemently dismissed. True to Eastern tradition, the depicted image was still seen as supportive of the higher planes of theology.
The exclusion of the Eastern Church from state structures forced the "priestless" groups in particular to re-evaluate the icon. To them, the icons, just like the writings, embodied a direct link back to the pre-reformist church. The icon consequently became a portable, and therefore available, central theological point of reference, ultimately one that was private and domestic, and hence the Sacrament of the Godly.
The leader of the movement, the archpriest Avvakum, describes in the following how the medium of the image takes over the function of the priest:
,,Vor dem Antlitz des Herrn macht die Kerze an, auf dem bereiteten Tisch, während des Gebets, sollte sich ein Gefäß mit Wein, Wasser und dem Leib Christi befinden. Mit Weihrauch sollte man die Bilder und das ganze Haus ausräuchern, dann das umhängende Kreuz küssen und sich vor dem Antlitz des Herrn verbeugen”. [13]
[Before the countenance of the Lord, light the candles, on the prepared table during prayer there should be a vessel with wine, water and the Body of Christ. Smoke out the pictures and the whole house with incense, then kiss the suspended cross and bow before the countenance of the Lord].
The bond of the Old Believers to their old icons defines their writings, which above all are seen as the very creed of their dissention. These are the so-called “Pastoral answers” (1719) and in particular the “Pomeranian answers” (1723). The latter are deemed to be the joint work of the monks from the monastery by the White Sea in the Vyg region under the supervision of Andrej Denisov (1674 - 1730). In the twentieth chapter, the authors of the works make reference to the past resolutions of the "Stoglav Synod", the church council of 1551 [14], to the writings of Simeon from Thessaloniki, († 1429), the resolutions of the VI. Ecumenical Council in Trullo at Constantinople from the year 691 [15] and, exceptionally, to the post-reformist work of the Muscovite Patriarch Joakim “Spiritual grammar”. The work of Patriarch Joakim was admittedly only written in 1690 after the split of the church, yet in old ritualist style it criticised the taking over and spread of western iconography.
The icon paintings of the Old Believers favoured topics that specifically supported their fundamental concepts. These included a great reverence for the old Russian images of the Mother of God, the Archangel Michael as leader of the heavenly hosts (Archistrátegos) and Lord of Souls on the Day of Judgment, as well as the multi-field icons relating to everyday life (particularly with the groups that were not led by priests). [16]
The way in which the Old Believers saw themselves is particularly tangible in the image Christ— the non-sleeping eye (Greek: Anapeson: he who slumbers). In Russia, the image that stands for the suffering and the glory of Christ is known as The Keeper of Israel does not sleep (Psalm 121:4). In this type of depiction, Christ Emmanuel (also Immanuel) is shown as a young man, diagonally, half-sitting, half-lying, floating above the Paradise-like landscape. His feet in the right bottom corner of the picture seem to touch the ground slightly. Above his head, almost central in the composition, the Mother of God inclines from the left in an attitude of intercession. From the right, likewise in bowed posture, the Angel Michael watches over the slumbering figure. In his covered hands he holds the Cross and other tools of the Passion. The eyes of the resting figure are open; the head is turned to rest on the right arm. The figure of Emmanuel is staring far into the horizon and proclaims Paradise and the Passion. The left hand is stretched out along the sumptuously clothed body. It is possible for the image The non-sleeping eye to vary with the three main actors, yet still based on this iconographic fundament.
The image might be enhanced by two angels descending from heaven (cherub and seraph), who are then holding tools of the Passion in their hands. In the heavenly sphere, the benign God the Father appears and below him the Dove of the Holy Spirit. In its place, it is possible for the Trinity from the Old Testament to be depicted. The slumbering figure is sometimes depicted on the tree of life or without any support at all, directly on the ground. It may also be that to His feet, the picture shows the empty tomb and swans. The background may be designed differently. Perhaps only the Garden of Paradise is shown in the lower region of the picture with small rocks, or the background is split threefold: the earth, golden background and clouds in the sky. Some pictures show a clear division: a lower black zone stands for the earth; the remaining upper area decorated with flowers is part of Paradise.
The ideas for this composition are derived from biblical and non-biblical sources. These include the early Christian Nature Book (Greek: Physiologus) with short stories about real and fantasy animals, trees and stones. The anonymous author of the work indulges in the Christian exegesis of the depicted world that is embellished with appropriate quotations from the Bible. Christ is compared with the lion. The eyes of the lion stay open during sleep; his successors are born dead and arise on the third day. In the Old Testament the lion stands for Jahwe. In the Book of Genesis (49:8-9) the lion symbolises anointment by God, the Saviour and Redeemer. In the apocalypse of St. John (5:5) the lion is named as lamb.
Analysis of the works of art from Greece and the Balkan states shows that the aforementioned depiction was positioned at three different optional locations in the temple: in the portico or narthex of the atrium, above the king’s portal, i.e. above the entrance to the sanctuary and in the prothesis (part of the service) chapel. The last positioning in the prothesis chapel leads us directly to the preparatory act for the Eucharistic sacrament. According to Simeon from Thessaloniki, the middle part of the prosphora bread on the diskos stands for the Lamb Christ, the left part for the Mother of God and the right part for angelic hoards and thus corresponds with the arrangement in the picture.
In the old Rus’ region, the image of the non-sleeping eye was already known in the 15th century and it can be assumed that it originated from Serbia and Macedonia. In the period from the 16th to the 18th century, large numbers of icons with this motif were created in Russia. It was celebrated as apotheosis of the Trinity, with particular emphasis— especially with the Old Believers— on the story of the Passion (angels with covered hands cf. depictions of the cross). With our own reflections on the movement of the Old Believers, the depiction of the resting Christ on earth is to be understood as symbolic for the martyrdom on earth in the kingdom of Satan. The act of sleeping is interpreted as tangible perception of death. In the ideology of the Old Believers, the earth was simply a place of despair and estrangement, and for proceeding into eternal life. The depiction “The non-sleeping eye”, that visualizes in its pictorial statement the theological allegory of "The Lord, the Keeper of Israel and Creator of the world does not slumber or sleep, but watches over and preserves his creation" confirms the claim of the Old Believers in naming themselves the "House of Israel", the "New Israel" or the "Gathering of the Children of Israel".
Metropolitan Kallistos: The Jesus Prayer for Daily Life
The Divine Liturgy of the Greek Orthodox Church in English
The Island
Meditation and the Art of Consciousness Hacking
February 2, 2018 by Pam Frost
I recently stumbled across the term “consciousness hacking” on a website of that name. The term is an apt description of a shift in Western consciousness caused by the ubiquitous influence of Eastern meditation, now considered a scientific technology of consciousness. The Consciousness Hacking website is a hub for those who hope, through an interface of science and consciousness, to help humanity evolve toward an age of “individual and collective flourishing.” Employing a variety of scientific technologies and meditative techniques as their hacking tools, this growing community intends to essentially upgrade humanity’s “conscious operating system.” How do they hope to accomplish such a Herculean feat? By training the brain into nonduality, which is a nonjudgmental, meditative grid by which to interpret reality. Believing technologically enhanced meditation will result in worldwide “peace, truth, love [and] enlightenment,” they are enthusiastically coordinating a neurological hack of the global mind. Reality will no longer be interpreted by subject/object distinctions (such as that between the Creator and creation— Twoism), but according to nondual (“not two”) consciousness of the divine within everyone (Oneism). They promise utopia by “democratizing the divine” so that an enlightened, united humanity can finally unlock the mystery of collective divinity (the goal of the Tower of Babel). Thus, techno-spirituality offers redemption by meditation rather than by the blood of Jesus. While the terminology is new, the idea behind it isn’t.
The original consciousness hacker was Satan himself, who urged man to become God by joining the opposites of good and evil. This is exactly what meditation does by suspending thought until a person enters a state of nondual consciousness and no longer perceives the distinction between Creator and creation, male and female, or good and evil. All blurs into One. The spirit behind meditation has long been at work in the West to shift the cultural consciousness from Twoism to Oneism.
Societies generally function according to a dominant cultural consensus—a social operating system based on a widely accepted consciousness of reality. The cultural consciousness of the Christian West once accepted a broad consensus defined by biblical theism and the morality of the Ten Commandments. Even unbelievers lived within the general moral framework of the Judeo-Christian worldview. Recognizing the distinctions between God and nature, men and women, right and wrong, good and evil and heaven and hell was common-place, even in a culture increasingly influenced by Darwinian naturalism. Yet, by the 1960s, a deep cauldron of discontent with the pragmatism and materialism of Modernity (falsely associated with Christianity), reached boiling point as thousands (half a million attended Woodstock) shook off the dust of their Christian heritage and turned to Eastern mysticism. The stone tablets were cast down, fragmenting the cultural consensus. Throngs of Hindu yogis and Buddhist monks rushed into the arms of the welcoming West, bringing exotic and alluring promises of self-realization and world peace. Higher states of meditative consciousness would dissolve subject/object distinctions into the Unitive power of One. Worship shifted from the Creator-Redeemer, who is outside us (Twoism), to divine Eastern consciousness, which comes from within (Oneism). The hacking of our consensual consciousness had begun in earnest!
Nearly sixty years later, we find a movement dubbed “enlightenment engineering,” which uses technology to accelerate and enhance the development of meditative consciousness. One of the leading innovators in this field is Mikey Siegel, the founder of Consciousness Hacking. Siegel’s passion to establish meditative consciousness as a kind of updated “conscious operating system” for humanity, developed from an extraordinary meditation experience after his life had taken an unexpected turn. After leaving MIT with a graduate degree in robotics, Siegel was “living the engineer’s dream,” having landed a coveted position in Silicon Valley. But the career he thought would fulfill him left him instead feeling empty, purposeless and anxious. Disillusioned, he struck out on a “vision quest” to the ashrams of India, where Hindu gurus instructed him in a new kind of consciousness, attained through meditation. In a TEDx talk, Siegel told of his life-changing experience, which occurred on the seventh day of an intensive ten-day, fourteen-hour-a-day meditation retreat. That day’s exercise involved sitting cross-legged on the floor to “focus with non-judgmental awareness on the sensations in [the] body.” After a few hours, Siegel experienced the intense back, knee and leg pain one would expect. But the godmen who are Hindu gurus demand complete submission from those who enter their ashrams, and Siegel had submitted to the command to exercise non-judgmentalism toward all his bodily sensations. “In an instant,” he recounts, “everything changed. The sensations didn’t go away, but somehow, they were okay. There was nothing wrong. There was no bad and there was no good because there was no judgment. Somehow, that part of the brain had shut off [TEDx talk].” The meditative experience had flashed over him as a liberating epiphany opening his mind to the nonduality of Eastern mysticism—the home of his new consciousness. Siegel’s consciousness had just been hacked.
By suspending the judgment of his normally functioning mind and abandoning himself to mental passivity, Siegel experienced the “enlightenment” of a higher state of transcendent consciousness in which neither “good” nor “bad” exists. According to Hinduism, the material world and the realm of distinctions are only an illusion (maya). The goal of meditation is to transcend these illusions until the soul (atman) is realized as god (brahman).
Siegel returned from India on an enthusiastic vision quest to explore meditation as a scientific technology with the capacity “to actually get to the inner root of human suffering, and get to the core of the fear, the greed, the selfishness that starts [in the heart]—that is the cause of so much tragedy on our planet.” Through his experience of nonduality, Siegel came to see meditation as the ultimate savior. “[I]f we think about the way meditation works,” he explains, “it’s not about more information. It’s actually about getting out of the mind and embedded in a non-conceptual present moment experience.” Siegel places absolute faith in meditation, the key to “ultimately change our mind so that we can live in a very different experience of reality.” Siegel’s salvation-by-meditation exchanges the atonement bought for sinners by Christ’s blood (which reconciles us to the God and Father outside us) for an inner state of enlightened consciousness.
Siegel anticipates a “Technological Renaissance” with power to heal the soul, much as medical science heals the body. Says Siegel, “So, in the same way that our understanding of biological science has helped eradicate smallpox from the earth, perhaps our understanding of contemplative [meditative] science can help eradicate the inner causes of human suffering.”
He is encouraged by the development of numerous wearable devices that enhance and accelerate meditative consciousness. One such device is the Muse, a “brain sensing headband,” which plays soothing sounds of weather patterns (like gentle rain or a soft breeze) when the mind is in an acceptably meditative state. Should the mind wander into thinking, however, it’s weather “handler” turns threatening, calling it back to the passive state of meditation. Siegel’s similar device, Heartsync, allows up to six participants to synchronize their heart rates through the guided breathing techniques of Eastern meditation. Sensors attached to each participant produce audio and visual stimuli to guide the group into a “synchronized state of calm and balance.” Siegel thus spreads his Oneist gospel of meditation to others by inviting them to share in the nondual consciousness (neither bad nor good exists) that flipped the switch in his own brain in an ashram in India.
There is nothing new in Siegel’s vision for humanity. It is the same vision the serpent imparted to Eve and to Adam in the Garden of Eden. Joining the opposites of good and evil did not lead them to enlightenment and self-realization, as Satan deceitfully promised. Instead, it led and continues to lead the human race into the entwining deception of demonic spirituality, which gives a counterfeit sense of god-consciousness and blinds people to their need of repentance and of trust in the redemptive grace of Jesus Christ. Using technological devices to regulate one’s brain waves and heart rate only serves to strengthen the deception. Mikey Siegel calls followers to look within—“It’s clear that there’s a trend where the attention is shifting from out there to in here”—but Scripture calls us to look outside ourselves to our God and Creator. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ can transform our “conscious operating system” from its self-destructive, inward-looking bent to an upward-looking worship that will create in us a clean heart. In Christ Jesus, God in the flesh, we who believe are new creatures, empowered by his Holy Spirit and Scripture to grow in sanctification, to discover our true identities and to enjoy a life set apart for the Gospel. All those who know him will, in unity and diversity, be attuned to the glory of his grace—without a MUSE attached to our heads or a HEARTSYNC to teach us to love one another.
Soli Deo Gloria!
February 2, 2018 by Pam Frost
I recently stumbled across the term “consciousness hacking” on a website of that name. The term is an apt description of a shift in Western consciousness caused by the ubiquitous influence of Eastern meditation, now considered a scientific technology of consciousness. The Consciousness Hacking website is a hub for those who hope, through an interface of science and consciousness, to help humanity evolve toward an age of “individual and collective flourishing.” Employing a variety of scientific technologies and meditative techniques as their hacking tools, this growing community intends to essentially upgrade humanity’s “conscious operating system.” How do they hope to accomplish such a Herculean feat? By training the brain into nonduality, which is a nonjudgmental, meditative grid by which to interpret reality. Believing technologically enhanced meditation will result in worldwide “peace, truth, love [and] enlightenment,” they are enthusiastically coordinating a neurological hack of the global mind. Reality will no longer be interpreted by subject/object distinctions (such as that between the Creator and creation— Twoism), but according to nondual (“not two”) consciousness of the divine within everyone (Oneism). They promise utopia by “democratizing the divine” so that an enlightened, united humanity can finally unlock the mystery of collective divinity (the goal of the Tower of Babel). Thus, techno-spirituality offers redemption by meditation rather than by the blood of Jesus. While the terminology is new, the idea behind it isn’t.
The original consciousness hacker was Satan himself, who urged man to become God by joining the opposites of good and evil. This is exactly what meditation does by suspending thought until a person enters a state of nondual consciousness and no longer perceives the distinction between Creator and creation, male and female, or good and evil. All blurs into One. The spirit behind meditation has long been at work in the West to shift the cultural consciousness from Twoism to Oneism.
Societies generally function according to a dominant cultural consensus—a social operating system based on a widely accepted consciousness of reality. The cultural consciousness of the Christian West once accepted a broad consensus defined by biblical theism and the morality of the Ten Commandments. Even unbelievers lived within the general moral framework of the Judeo-Christian worldview. Recognizing the distinctions between God and nature, men and women, right and wrong, good and evil and heaven and hell was common-place, even in a culture increasingly influenced by Darwinian naturalism. Yet, by the 1960s, a deep cauldron of discontent with the pragmatism and materialism of Modernity (falsely associated with Christianity), reached boiling point as thousands (half a million attended Woodstock) shook off the dust of their Christian heritage and turned to Eastern mysticism. The stone tablets were cast down, fragmenting the cultural consensus. Throngs of Hindu yogis and Buddhist monks rushed into the arms of the welcoming West, bringing exotic and alluring promises of self-realization and world peace. Higher states of meditative consciousness would dissolve subject/object distinctions into the Unitive power of One. Worship shifted from the Creator-Redeemer, who is outside us (Twoism), to divine Eastern consciousness, which comes from within (Oneism). The hacking of our consensual consciousness had begun in earnest!
Nearly sixty years later, we find a movement dubbed “enlightenment engineering,” which uses technology to accelerate and enhance the development of meditative consciousness. One of the leading innovators in this field is Mikey Siegel, the founder of Consciousness Hacking. Siegel’s passion to establish meditative consciousness as a kind of updated “conscious operating system” for humanity, developed from an extraordinary meditation experience after his life had taken an unexpected turn. After leaving MIT with a graduate degree in robotics, Siegel was “living the engineer’s dream,” having landed a coveted position in Silicon Valley. But the career he thought would fulfill him left him instead feeling empty, purposeless and anxious. Disillusioned, he struck out on a “vision quest” to the ashrams of India, where Hindu gurus instructed him in a new kind of consciousness, attained through meditation. In a TEDx talk, Siegel told of his life-changing experience, which occurred on the seventh day of an intensive ten-day, fourteen-hour-a-day meditation retreat. That day’s exercise involved sitting cross-legged on the floor to “focus with non-judgmental awareness on the sensations in [the] body.” After a few hours, Siegel experienced the intense back, knee and leg pain one would expect. But the godmen who are Hindu gurus demand complete submission from those who enter their ashrams, and Siegel had submitted to the command to exercise non-judgmentalism toward all his bodily sensations. “In an instant,” he recounts, “everything changed. The sensations didn’t go away, but somehow, they were okay. There was nothing wrong. There was no bad and there was no good because there was no judgment. Somehow, that part of the brain had shut off [TEDx talk].” The meditative experience had flashed over him as a liberating epiphany opening his mind to the nonduality of Eastern mysticism—the home of his new consciousness. Siegel’s consciousness had just been hacked.
By suspending the judgment of his normally functioning mind and abandoning himself to mental passivity, Siegel experienced the “enlightenment” of a higher state of transcendent consciousness in which neither “good” nor “bad” exists. According to Hinduism, the material world and the realm of distinctions are only an illusion (maya). The goal of meditation is to transcend these illusions until the soul (atman) is realized as god (brahman).
Siegel returned from India on an enthusiastic vision quest to explore meditation as a scientific technology with the capacity “to actually get to the inner root of human suffering, and get to the core of the fear, the greed, the selfishness that starts [in the heart]—that is the cause of so much tragedy on our planet.” Through his experience of nonduality, Siegel came to see meditation as the ultimate savior. “[I]f we think about the way meditation works,” he explains, “it’s not about more information. It’s actually about getting out of the mind and embedded in a non-conceptual present moment experience.” Siegel places absolute faith in meditation, the key to “ultimately change our mind so that we can live in a very different experience of reality.” Siegel’s salvation-by-meditation exchanges the atonement bought for sinners by Christ’s blood (which reconciles us to the God and Father outside us) for an inner state of enlightened consciousness.
Siegel anticipates a “Technological Renaissance” with power to heal the soul, much as medical science heals the body. Says Siegel, “So, in the same way that our understanding of biological science has helped eradicate smallpox from the earth, perhaps our understanding of contemplative [meditative] science can help eradicate the inner causes of human suffering.”
He is encouraged by the development of numerous wearable devices that enhance and accelerate meditative consciousness. One such device is the Muse, a “brain sensing headband,” which plays soothing sounds of weather patterns (like gentle rain or a soft breeze) when the mind is in an acceptably meditative state. Should the mind wander into thinking, however, it’s weather “handler” turns threatening, calling it back to the passive state of meditation. Siegel’s similar device, Heartsync, allows up to six participants to synchronize their heart rates through the guided breathing techniques of Eastern meditation. Sensors attached to each participant produce audio and visual stimuli to guide the group into a “synchronized state of calm and balance.” Siegel thus spreads his Oneist gospel of meditation to others by inviting them to share in the nondual consciousness (neither bad nor good exists) that flipped the switch in his own brain in an ashram in India.
There is nothing new in Siegel’s vision for humanity. It is the same vision the serpent imparted to Eve and to Adam in the Garden of Eden. Joining the opposites of good and evil did not lead them to enlightenment and self-realization, as Satan deceitfully promised. Instead, it led and continues to lead the human race into the entwining deception of demonic spirituality, which gives a counterfeit sense of god-consciousness and blinds people to their need of repentance and of trust in the redemptive grace of Jesus Christ. Using technological devices to regulate one’s brain waves and heart rate only serves to strengthen the deception. Mikey Siegel calls followers to look within—“It’s clear that there’s a trend where the attention is shifting from out there to in here”—but Scripture calls us to look outside ourselves to our God and Creator. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ can transform our “conscious operating system” from its self-destructive, inward-looking bent to an upward-looking worship that will create in us a clean heart. In Christ Jesus, God in the flesh, we who believe are new creatures, empowered by his Holy Spirit and Scripture to grow in sanctification, to discover our true identities and to enjoy a life set apart for the Gospel. All those who know him will, in unity and diversity, be attuned to the glory of his grace—without a MUSE attached to our heads or a HEARTSYNC to teach us to love one another.
Soli Deo Gloria!
The Nature of Existence: All is One, or All is Two?
January 24, 2018 by Dr. Peter Jones
This question about existence seems very simple, but human beings can only answer it by faith, since not one of us can stand outside of existence to make an “objective,” all-knowing judgment about the nature of things. We need help. The only possible answers are Oneism or Twoism.
Oneism and The Lie Oneism begins with the conviction that human beings are part of nature and that nature, as the origin of all things, is divine. It also assumes that we are all pure and innocent and that evil is just another side of good. These are two essential faith convictions of Oneism. In the Bible’s account of reality, however, we don’t start with a clean slate of beautiful intentions to love our neighbor and our God with all our heart and soul. We begin, instead, with realism about conflict in our world. We understand that a false definition of existence keeps us in willful ignorance of our truly rebellious state. On this false sense of innocence we build a false notion of God.
The Bible speaks of “the lie,” fabricated by the Father of Lies (Satan), who rejected God before the creation of humanity. The Lie Satan brought to us is a refusal to recognize that we, like all created beings, are accountable to God, the transcendent Creator Lord. The Lie calls the Author of life an Arch-Liar, and constructs human religious thinking on the basis of a fundamental misrepresentation of the truth. This false, pagan view of God is a death blow to any genuine wisdom about the ultimate issues of life. Paul says: although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened (v.21). Such darkened hearts lead to a deadly exchange in Romans 1:25: They exchanged the truth about God for the lie, and that of v.18, …[they] suppress the truth by their wickedness. Human beings know God in the depth of their being, but refuse to act in light of such knowledge. But they do act, because they do have a need for spirituality. The knowledge of God is at the core of our being as humans, so if we reject the Creator God, we will make for ourselves another form of the divine. Paul captures this in one profound phrase: they worshiped creation (v.25).
This is worship, not just an intellectual denial. This denial is expressed in three areas: what we believe about who God is, what we believe about spirituality, and what we believe about sexuality [We will develop these latter two issues in forthcoming blogs]. Regarding God, those who worship creation are living in fundamental, generalized rebellion. That rebellion stems from the way we think about God and about his self-revelation in nature and in words. This is why we speak of “theology,” made up of two words: “theos,” (God), and “logy” (logos), that is, words or thinking about God. So we see why Paul says they “exchanged the truth” about God for “the lie.” Something deep goes on in the human mind.
Twoism and The Truth Christians also must answer questions about human existence, but they start with faith in a God outside the universe, who reveals himself to us in nature, in Jesus and in the Bible. I once attended the Parliament of the World’s Religions, where I heard Robert Mueller (Assistant General Secretary of the United Nations, and a New Age pagan mystic), say: “there is no ‘In the beginning, God created…’ at the UN.” The Bible doesn’t begin by denying the Creator, like Mueller or like so-called “Christian” Gnosticism. It doesn’t even begin with the heart-warming message, “In the beginning Christ died for my sins.” That comes later. Rather, it begins with precisely what the UN denies, a massive, over-arching statement of the origin of our existence: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The Old Testament stakes its reputation on the goodness of creation and on the eternal reality of the Creator, who stands outside the creation as its Maker. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul says the same thing, describing God as he “who. . . gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom 4:17). This is a verse affirming creation ex nihilo, creation from nothing!
A liberal Old Testament scholar of the last century saw the uniqueness of the biblical message announced by Moses in the ancient pagan world of Oneism and observed:
What distinguishes the Genesis account of creation among the many creation stories of the Ancient Near East is that for Genesis there can be only one creator and that all else that is or can be, can never be anything but a creature.[1]
As a liberal, Westermann may not have believed consistently what he wrote about, but he certainly sees the Bible’s message clearly.
When Jesus was asked, What is the first and greatest commandment?, he answered without hesitation:
The most important is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mk. 12:28–31)
Jesus is quoting the SHEMA, which is the essence of Old Testament faith. The Jewish people repeated this foundational confession of Israel in their morning and evening prayer services for thousands of years: Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eḥad. (Apparently, singer Justin Bieber says the Shema before each public performance, which is not a bad place to start!)
This confession expresses the uniqueness of God. God is other than we are, as Twoism requires. We are not God. We are his creatures. God stands behind the amazing reality we call creation.
Even Nobel laureate and atheist Dr. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) admitted that because it is impossible to give any numerical value to the probability of chance events, the origin of life appears almost as a miracle. The late English astronomer and atheist, Sir Fred Hoyle (who coined the term “big bang”), was even more courageous than Crick, when he said that it is absurd to think that life came about by chance. He calculated that there is not enough time in the fifteen-billion-year-old universe for mere chance to produce all the incredibly complex higher life forms. The amazing cellular order of the universe had to be the result of an external intelligent design, a theory he thought so obvious that he wondered why it was not accepted as self-evident.[2]
My recently deceased friend, R C Sproul, helpfully observed that “The basis of materialistic atheism is the belief that nothing plus time plus chance equals order and complexity.” Atheists have no account of origins, (which they admit), they merely observe physical changes across time, caused as they say by irrational forces, and yet they are faced with an incredibly complicated and intelligent universe and can only open their mouths to speak by presupposing the obvious fact of an intelligent universe. In other words, this is absolute foolishness.
We all stand before the dilemma expressed by Colin Gunton, one of the best British theologians of his generation, who stated:
There are, probably, ultimately only two possible answers to the question of origins, and they recur at different places in all ages: [either] that the universe is the result of creation by a free personal [intelligent] agency, or that in some way or other it creates itself. The two answers are not finally compatible, and require a choice, either between them or an attitude of agnostic refusal to decide.[3]
Both nature and Jesus teach us the emptiness of Oneism. Twoism is the only one that makes sense of such a rich, glorious world, full of beauty, song, language, morals and human beings—the unique image-bearers of a transcendent, loving Father.
[1] Klaus Westermann, Genesis (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1995), 127.
[2] https://www.algemeiner.com/2011/08/17/scientists-prove-again-that-life-is-the-result-of-intelligent-design/.
[3] Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
January 24, 2018 by Dr. Peter Jones
This question about existence seems very simple, but human beings can only answer it by faith, since not one of us can stand outside of existence to make an “objective,” all-knowing judgment about the nature of things. We need help. The only possible answers are Oneism or Twoism.
Oneism and The Lie Oneism begins with the conviction that human beings are part of nature and that nature, as the origin of all things, is divine. It also assumes that we are all pure and innocent and that evil is just another side of good. These are two essential faith convictions of Oneism. In the Bible’s account of reality, however, we don’t start with a clean slate of beautiful intentions to love our neighbor and our God with all our heart and soul. We begin, instead, with realism about conflict in our world. We understand that a false definition of existence keeps us in willful ignorance of our truly rebellious state. On this false sense of innocence we build a false notion of God.
The Bible speaks of “the lie,” fabricated by the Father of Lies (Satan), who rejected God before the creation of humanity. The Lie Satan brought to us is a refusal to recognize that we, like all created beings, are accountable to God, the transcendent Creator Lord. The Lie calls the Author of life an Arch-Liar, and constructs human religious thinking on the basis of a fundamental misrepresentation of the truth. This false, pagan view of God is a death blow to any genuine wisdom about the ultimate issues of life. Paul says: although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened (v.21). Such darkened hearts lead to a deadly exchange in Romans 1:25: They exchanged the truth about God for the lie, and that of v.18, …[they] suppress the truth by their wickedness. Human beings know God in the depth of their being, but refuse to act in light of such knowledge. But they do act, because they do have a need for spirituality. The knowledge of God is at the core of our being as humans, so if we reject the Creator God, we will make for ourselves another form of the divine. Paul captures this in one profound phrase: they worshiped creation (v.25).
This is worship, not just an intellectual denial. This denial is expressed in three areas: what we believe about who God is, what we believe about spirituality, and what we believe about sexuality [We will develop these latter two issues in forthcoming blogs]. Regarding God, those who worship creation are living in fundamental, generalized rebellion. That rebellion stems from the way we think about God and about his self-revelation in nature and in words. This is why we speak of “theology,” made up of two words: “theos,” (God), and “logy” (logos), that is, words or thinking about God. So we see why Paul says they “exchanged the truth” about God for “the lie.” Something deep goes on in the human mind.
Twoism and The Truth Christians also must answer questions about human existence, but they start with faith in a God outside the universe, who reveals himself to us in nature, in Jesus and in the Bible. I once attended the Parliament of the World’s Religions, where I heard Robert Mueller (Assistant General Secretary of the United Nations, and a New Age pagan mystic), say: “there is no ‘In the beginning, God created…’ at the UN.” The Bible doesn’t begin by denying the Creator, like Mueller or like so-called “Christian” Gnosticism. It doesn’t even begin with the heart-warming message, “In the beginning Christ died for my sins.” That comes later. Rather, it begins with precisely what the UN denies, a massive, over-arching statement of the origin of our existence: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The Old Testament stakes its reputation on the goodness of creation and on the eternal reality of the Creator, who stands outside the creation as its Maker. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul says the same thing, describing God as he “who. . . gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom 4:17). This is a verse affirming creation ex nihilo, creation from nothing!
A liberal Old Testament scholar of the last century saw the uniqueness of the biblical message announced by Moses in the ancient pagan world of Oneism and observed:
What distinguishes the Genesis account of creation among the many creation stories of the Ancient Near East is that for Genesis there can be only one creator and that all else that is or can be, can never be anything but a creature.[1]
As a liberal, Westermann may not have believed consistently what he wrote about, but he certainly sees the Bible’s message clearly.
When Jesus was asked, What is the first and greatest commandment?, he answered without hesitation:
The most important is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mk. 12:28–31)
Jesus is quoting the SHEMA, which is the essence of Old Testament faith. The Jewish people repeated this foundational confession of Israel in their morning and evening prayer services for thousands of years: Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eḥad. (Apparently, singer Justin Bieber says the Shema before each public performance, which is not a bad place to start!)
This confession expresses the uniqueness of God. God is other than we are, as Twoism requires. We are not God. We are his creatures. God stands behind the amazing reality we call creation.
Even Nobel laureate and atheist Dr. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) admitted that because it is impossible to give any numerical value to the probability of chance events, the origin of life appears almost as a miracle. The late English astronomer and atheist, Sir Fred Hoyle (who coined the term “big bang”), was even more courageous than Crick, when he said that it is absurd to think that life came about by chance. He calculated that there is not enough time in the fifteen-billion-year-old universe for mere chance to produce all the incredibly complex higher life forms. The amazing cellular order of the universe had to be the result of an external intelligent design, a theory he thought so obvious that he wondered why it was not accepted as self-evident.[2]
My recently deceased friend, R C Sproul, helpfully observed that “The basis of materialistic atheism is the belief that nothing plus time plus chance equals order and complexity.” Atheists have no account of origins, (which they admit), they merely observe physical changes across time, caused as they say by irrational forces, and yet they are faced with an incredibly complicated and intelligent universe and can only open their mouths to speak by presupposing the obvious fact of an intelligent universe. In other words, this is absolute foolishness.
We all stand before the dilemma expressed by Colin Gunton, one of the best British theologians of his generation, who stated:
There are, probably, ultimately only two possible answers to the question of origins, and they recur at different places in all ages: [either] that the universe is the result of creation by a free personal [intelligent] agency, or that in some way or other it creates itself. The two answers are not finally compatible, and require a choice, either between them or an attitude of agnostic refusal to decide.[3]
Both nature and Jesus teach us the emptiness of Oneism. Twoism is the only one that makes sense of such a rich, glorious world, full of beauty, song, language, morals and human beings—the unique image-bearers of a transcendent, loving Father.
[1] Klaus Westermann, Genesis (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1995), 127.
[2] https://www.algemeiner.com/2011/08/17/scientists-prove-again-that-life-is-the-result-of-intelligent-design/.
[3] Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
Gnosticism and the Struggle for the World's Soul
by FATHER ALFONSO AGUILAR
At the beginning of the third millennium three worldviews compete to conquer the minds and hearts of peoples and cultures, the world's soul: materialistic relativism, Gnosticism and Christianity. The New Evangelization demands a clear-cut separation between Gnosticism and Christianity if we want to bring every thirsty person to the Water of Life.
What do Harry Potter, the Star Wars series, The Matrix, Masonry, New Age and the Raelian cult, which claims to have cloned the first baby, have in common?
Their ideological soil. Identical esoteric ideas suffuse the novels, the movies, the lodges, the "alternative spirituality" and the cloning "atheistic religion," and this ideological soil has a name Gnosticism.
"Gnosticism" is an eerie word whose meaning eludes our minds. I often meet Catholics who have heard the term but have only a foggy idea of what it means. Perhaps Gnosticism itself is foggy.
Yet, whether we understand it or not, Gnosticism may be, at the beginning of the third millennium, the most dangerous enemy to our Christian faith. Notice, I'm not saying Star Wars or Harry Potter is the danger. They provide us with good lessons and fine entertainment. They are just two signs of the power of the real enemy: Gnosticism.
Why? What is Gnosticism?
In one dense but masterful summary, we find the essential aspects of Gnosticism. In his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II writes:
"A separate issue is the return of ancient Gnostic ideas under the guise of the so-called New Age. We cannot delude ourselves that this will lead toward a renewal of religion. It is only a new way of practicing Gnosticism that attitude of the spirit that, in the name of a profound knowledge of God, results in distorting his word and replacing it with purely human words. Gnosticism never completely abandoned the realm of Christianity. Instead, it has always existed side by side with Christianity, sometimes taking the shape of philosophical movement, but more often assuming the characteristics of a religion or para-religion in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian."Let's examine what the Holy Father is saying about Gnosticism.
"Secret Knowledge"?
First, its nature. Strictly speaking, Gnosticism was an esoteric religious movement of the first centuries A.D., a movement that rivaled Christianity. In a broader sense, it is an esoteric knowledge of higher religious and philosophic truths to be acquired by an elite group. John Paul alludes to the first meaning with the phrase "ancient Gnostic ideas" and to the second as an "attitude of the spirit" that "has always existed side by side with Christianity."
A Gnostic is one who has gnosis (a Greek word for "knowledge") a visionary or mystical "secret knowledge" capable of joining the human being to the divine mystery. Gnostics, the Pope remarked, distort God's word "in the name of a profound knowledge of God." What is this "knowledge" they claim to have?
The Gnostic worldview is dualistic. Reality consists of two irreducible elements: one good, the spiritual world (the realm of light); and the other evil, matter (the realm of darkness). Two supreme powers or gods oppose each other the unknowable and ineffable god, from whom a series of lesser divinities emanated, and the evil god, or demiurge, who produced the universe from foul matter and possesses it with his evil demons.
Man is composed of body, soul and spirit. The spirit is man's true self, a "divine spark," a portion of the godhead. In a tragic fall, man's true self, or spirit, was thrown into this dark world and imprisoned in each individual's body and soul. The demiurge and the demons keep man's spirit as a slave of the material world, ignorant of his "divine" condition. Hence the need for a spiritual savior, a messiah or "Christ," to offer redeeming gnosis. This savior is a guide, a master who teaches a few "spiritual" people the Gnostics about their true spiritual selves and helps them to wake up from the dream world they live in. The Gnostics would be released from the material world, the non-Gnostics doomed to reincarnation.
What is an example of how these beliefs are embodied in popular stories? Consider the Star Wars movies. There is much good in them. The stories are admirable in many ways. But they are chock-full of Gnosticism.
Star Wars is the clash between the two supreme powers of the universe "the force" and the "dark side of the force," which is exploited by the "emperor" (the demiurge) and his demons (Darth Vader, the siths). The Gnostic heroes are the Jedi, who possess the "secret knowledge" of their own spiritual powers; unlike the non-Gnostic, they are able to use "the force" well. Each Jedi has a master, who trains him to acquire this redeeming gnosis. Ben Kenobi, for instance, was for a time the master of Anakin and Luke Skywalker. The greatest spiritual guide in the saga is Yoda, a respected senior member of the Jedi council and a general in the clone wars.
As Christ's followers, we must sort out the good seed from the weeds (cf. Matthew 13:24-30). I propose a distinction between the Gnostic values and its philosophy.
Gnostics promote, without a doubt, positive values. They draw a clear-cut separation between good and evil, stress man's spiritual dimension, instill high and noble ideals, foster courage and concern for others, respect nature, reject materialism and often reject hedonism, too.
Such values shine like pearls in an age of moral relativism that thirsts for gain, the ephemeral, the hedonistic. Aren't these some of the virtues and ideas we love in Star Wars and Harry Potter?
The other side of the coin, however, is not so positive. The good values are rooted in a Gnostic philosophical understanding of man, God and the world that is, as the Pope put it, "in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian." Why?
Note the opposite views. The Christian Creator is love a Trinity of persons who wants to establish with us a personal relationship of love quite different from that unknowable God, usually conceived, like the Star Wars "force," as an impersonal energy to be manipulated.
The God of Revelation made everything good the angels, the world, our body and soul. Evil is not a force of the same rank as God; rather, it springs from angels' and men's personal free choice. Salvation is offered by God in Christ, man's only redeemer.
Salvation is a grace a free gift from God that Man can neither deserve nor earn. It is not gnosis, "secret knowledge" we can acquire by ourselves with the help of mere human guides or Christlike figures. In short, the Christian religion is a "dialogue" of love between God and man, not a self-centered "monologue" in which man divinizes himself. That's why John Paul says Gnosticism cannot lead "toward a renewal of religion."
It distorts God's word, "replacing it with purely human words."
Then and Now
Finally, the Pope alludes to the historic span and manifestations of this ideology. "Gnosticism," he says, "never completely abandoned the realm of Christianity sometimes taking the shape of philosophical movement but more often assuming the characteristics of a religion or para-religion."
Let's look at a few representative Gnostic movements in history.
With the rise of Christianity, ancient esoteric ideas developed into Gnostic syncretism. Thus, in the first centuries A.D., the Apostles and the Church Fathers had to combat several "Christian" Gnostic religious systems, such as those of Cerinthus, Manander, Saturninus, Valentinus, Basilides, Ptolemaeus and the ones contained in the apocryphal gospels: of truth and perfection, and of Judas (Iscariot), Philip and Thomas.
The third-century dualist Manichaean church or religion spread from Persia throughout the Middle East, China, southern Europe and northern Africa, where the young Augustine temporarily became a convert.
Teachings similar to Manichaeism resurfaced during the Middle Ages in Europe in groups such as the Paulicians (Armenia, seventh century), the Bogomilists (Bulgaria, 10th century), the Cathars or Albigensians (southern France, 12th century), the Jewish Cabala and the metaphysical speculation surrounding alchemy.
Modern times witnessed the resurgence of Gnosticism in philosophical thought the Enlightenment, Hegel's idealism, some existentialist currents, Nazism, Jungian psychology, the theosophical society and Freemasonry.
More recently, Gnosticism has become popular through successful films and novels, such as Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Matrix. It has also gained followers among the ranks of ordinary people through pseudo-religious "movements," such as the New Age and the Raelian cult.
These contemporary Gnostic expressions should certainly inspire us in the good values they promote. At the same time, we should be cautious examine their philosophical background and reject what is incompatible with our Christian faith.
At the beginning of the third millennium we seem to face the same old clash between Christianity and Gnosticism. Both fight to conquer the "soul" of this world the minds and hearts of peoples and cultures.
For this reason, defeating Gnosticism has become an essential task of the New Evangelization. "Against the spirit of the world," the Holy Father says in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, "the Church takes up anew each day a struggle that is none other than the struggle for the world's soul."
Into the Gnostic Wonderland
Morpheus, a man with circular mirrored glasses, approaches Neo Anderson, a young man who feels something is wrong with the world.
"You are a slave, Neo," the man says. "You, like everyone else, were born into bondage kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste or touch. A prison for your mind."
Morpheus holds two pills in his hands one blue, one red.
"This is your last chance; after this, there is no going back," he says. "You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." Neo takes the red pill.
Sounds familiar? It is a memorable scene of the hit movie The Matrix.
Morpheus' offer visualizes what our culture often offers. The blue pill stands for materialistic relativism believing there is no truth nor right and wrong, or, as Morpheus put it, "You believe whatever you want to believe."
Consequently, "You wake in bed" you enjoy yourself in comfort, money, hedonistic pleasures, social success. We often see the blue pill available over the counter in books, colleges, courts, institutions, the media.
The red pill stands for Gnosticism believing reality is ultimately divine and can be manipulated by whoever has "secret knowledge." This is "Wonderland," and it, too, can now be bought over the counter like the blue pill.
Thank God there is a third option Morpheus didn't take into account something neither blue nor red but transparent: Call it water. Water stands for our Christian faith. Christ, the water of life (see John 7:37-39), came to bring us the "living water" of "eternal life" (see John 4:7-13) through the water of baptism.
The blue and red pills counter the effects of water in different ways. Materialistic relativism tries to destroy all objective truths and values. Gnosticism, instead, proposes alternative truths and values. Moreover, it interprets Christianity as esoteric knowledge, not to destroy it but to distort it.
Neo, Vader and Voldemort
First, where is Gnosticism in today's culture? You might bump into it in successful films and novels, such as Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Matrix, or face it in "religious" and "philosophical" movements, such as the New Age, the Raelian cult and Freemasonry.
Note the difference between the three media products and the three movements: The movies and the books do not instill a credo you must believe in if you want to watch, read and enjoy them. In fact, they are commendable in many ways they provide us with elevated entertainment, valuable lessons and admirable heroes.
The movements, instead, are credos one must embrace in order to be an authentic New Ager, Raelian or Mason. As Catholics, we might be inspired by the noble ideals of these movements but not by their philosophy. Their philosophy is "Wonderland." And "Wonderland" is not "Christianland."
What is the Gnostic "Wonderland"?
The story of The Matrix shows it.
Morpheus reveals to Neo that human beings are trapped in a false "reality." Why? Some time ago men created the Matrix, an artificially intelligent entity. Needing man's energy to survive, the Matrix became a computer-generated dreamworld the world we think we live in to enslave men in a huge lab and suck their energy with the help of "agents."
However, a man succeeded in freeing the first human beings and teaching them the truth before he died.
The Oracle (a prophet) predicted this man will return to liberate all people and bring them to Zion, the last human city. Thus, a few freed men and women free others, looking for this man. Morpheus believes Neo to be the One and tries to free his mind so Neo can operate as the savior he is.
Here is the story's translation into the Gnostic worldview:
Two supreme powers or gods fight one another for supremacy. One is the pleroma ("fullness" in Greek) the good unknowable godhead, from whom many spiritual entities called aeons emanated. The other is an evil, deformed god, called the demiurge ("craftsman") that fashioned the flawed universe, along with archons, or demons.
Reality is dualistic. Everything is spiritual, particularly but not solely man's spirit. This is man's own true self, and it is good, for it is a portion of the pleroma's divine essence. Everything material, like man's body, is foul and evil, because it was produced by the demiurge and his demons to keep man's spirit a slave in the material prison of creation. Thus, every human being, knowingly or unknowingly, serves this false god and lives ignorant of his divine condition. His fate is reincarnation.
How does one free oneself from matter and join the divine pleroma? Through secret, esoteric knowledge called gnosis the visionary or mystical awareness of one's own divinity. One becomes a Gnostic by following spiritual guides or masters, historical figures of the "Christ," such as Jesus of Nazareth, Buddha, Moses, Mohammed and Rael.
Review the story of The Matrix and our introductory scene and you will understand the philosophy.
Zion and mankind stand for the pleroma. The Matrix and its "agents" are the demiurge and his archons, who created the illusory world to enslave man and hinder him from realizing their spiritual powers. Morpheus and his crew are the Gnostic. Morpheus is also Neo's guide. Neo will become the ultimate "Christ," the One who will offer redeeming gnosis to the rest of the mortals.
Consider the Star Wars series. "The force" is the good godhead opposed by "the dark side of the force," which the emperor (the demiurge) and his siths (the archons) employ to enslave all peoples. Only the Jedis (the Gnostic) are capable of transcending the physical laws of nature and join "the force" to use it for the salvation of all. Each Jedi acquires gnosis with the help of a master. Yoda, for instance, trained Ben Kenobi, and Ben Kenobi trained Anakin and Luke Skywalker. In the last scene of The Return of the Jedi, you see Yoda, Ben Kenobi and Anakin "saved" "energized" with "the force."
Harry Potter follows a similar pattern. It portrays the clash between the "white" magic (the pleroma) practiced by the witches and wizards (the Gnostic) and the dark arts exploited by the Dark Lord Voldemort (the demiurge) and his followers in the Slytherin House (the demons). Every professor at Hogwarts is, of course, a master, with Albus Dumbledore as the school headmaster. The non-Gnostic are called the Muggles, ignorant human beings who, like the Dursley family, are subject to the laws of the material world.
We expect Harry Potter to finally become the "Christ," the savior. Note the boy never becomes a wizard and never acquires magic powers. He only becomes aware, through training, that he is a wizard and has these powers from birth. That's gnosis.
Most people who enjoy these three popular sagas might be inspired by their positive values but do not take their Gnostic wonderland seriously. But to leave fiction and enter the New Age movement, the Raelian religion or Freemasonry requires a "conversion" of the initiated. To join, you must swallow the red pill.
The pleroma is the Mason's inaccessible great architect and his divinities, the New Agers' impersonal "energy" or the Raelians' community of wise extraterrestrial scientists called Elohim who created all life on earth 25,000 years ago. The three groups identify the demiurge with all "dogmatic" churches and religions but especially with the Catholic Church with her archons (the Church leaders and particularly the Pope) she traps men in the false "reality" of Christian Revelation, hindering them from the self-consciousness of their own divinity.
The Gnostic are the Masons, the New Agers, the Raelians. Many historical figures have incarnated the "Christ," known as Maitreya in Masonic and New Age circles and as Rael ("the messenger") among Raelians.
Water or the Red Pill?
On the surface Gnostic wonderlands might look Christian they promote religiosity, spiritual values, concern for others, respect for nature, the sense of mission, rejection of materialistic relativism. How can we discern if a movie, a novel, a movement or an organization is rooted in a Gnostic or in a Christian worldview?
We need to examine its underlying concept of God, man and the world. First, God: Is God the only supreme good power or is there another evil force of the same rank? Is God somebody with whom we have a personal relationship of love or something like a force to be used? Is Jesus of Nazareth the only savior or are there many "Christs"?
Second, check the notion of man: Is he a loved creature or a portion of divinity to be freed? Is man a unity of body and soul or just a spirit imprisoned in a body? Does man's salvation come from a gratuitous gift of God (grace) or from "secret knowledge" acquired by training (gnosis)?
Third, think of the world: Is creation good and real or evil and illusory a sort of prison?
The answers unveil the pervading philosophy. A fictional story, of course, does not need to present the Christian truths. The question is whether or not there is room for a Christian worldview in the story.
Mark this substantial difference: A red pill is a man-made drug that may fail to cure; water, instead, is a God-made basic element for life. Gnosticism is a man-made self-centered philosophy a "monologue" in which man divinizes himself and fails in the attempt. The Christian revelation is a God-made gift "dialogue" of love that God establishes with man for eternal life.
The Christian revelation is Christ. To definitively discern what is Christian from what is not use what I call "St. John's criterion": "By this you know the spirit of God: Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world" (2 John 4:2-3).
At the beginning of the third millennium three worldviews compete to conquer the minds and hearts of peoples and cultures, the world's soul: materialistic relativism, Gnosticism and Christianity. The blue pill is easy to recognize. But the red pill is often dissolved in apparent water.
The New Evangelization demands a clear-cut separation between Gnosticism and Christianity if we want to bring every thirsty person to the Water of Life.
Acknowledgement:
Father Alfonso Aguilar. "Gnosticism and the Struggle for the World's Soul." National Catholic Register. (April 6-12, 2003)
by FATHER ALFONSO AGUILAR
At the beginning of the third millennium three worldviews compete to conquer the minds and hearts of peoples and cultures, the world's soul: materialistic relativism, Gnosticism and Christianity. The New Evangelization demands a clear-cut separation between Gnosticism and Christianity if we want to bring every thirsty person to the Water of Life.
What do Harry Potter, the Star Wars series, The Matrix, Masonry, New Age and the Raelian cult, which claims to have cloned the first baby, have in common?
Their ideological soil. Identical esoteric ideas suffuse the novels, the movies, the lodges, the "alternative spirituality" and the cloning "atheistic religion," and this ideological soil has a name Gnosticism.
"Gnosticism" is an eerie word whose meaning eludes our minds. I often meet Catholics who have heard the term but have only a foggy idea of what it means. Perhaps Gnosticism itself is foggy.
Yet, whether we understand it or not, Gnosticism may be, at the beginning of the third millennium, the most dangerous enemy to our Christian faith. Notice, I'm not saying Star Wars or Harry Potter is the danger. They provide us with good lessons and fine entertainment. They are just two signs of the power of the real enemy: Gnosticism.
Why? What is Gnosticism?
In one dense but masterful summary, we find the essential aspects of Gnosticism. In his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II writes:
"A separate issue is the return of ancient Gnostic ideas under the guise of the so-called New Age. We cannot delude ourselves that this will lead toward a renewal of religion. It is only a new way of practicing Gnosticism that attitude of the spirit that, in the name of a profound knowledge of God, results in distorting his word and replacing it with purely human words. Gnosticism never completely abandoned the realm of Christianity. Instead, it has always existed side by side with Christianity, sometimes taking the shape of philosophical movement, but more often assuming the characteristics of a religion or para-religion in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian."Let's examine what the Holy Father is saying about Gnosticism.
"Secret Knowledge"?
First, its nature. Strictly speaking, Gnosticism was an esoteric religious movement of the first centuries A.D., a movement that rivaled Christianity. In a broader sense, it is an esoteric knowledge of higher religious and philosophic truths to be acquired by an elite group. John Paul alludes to the first meaning with the phrase "ancient Gnostic ideas" and to the second as an "attitude of the spirit" that "has always existed side by side with Christianity."
A Gnostic is one who has gnosis (a Greek word for "knowledge") a visionary or mystical "secret knowledge" capable of joining the human being to the divine mystery. Gnostics, the Pope remarked, distort God's word "in the name of a profound knowledge of God." What is this "knowledge" they claim to have?
The Gnostic worldview is dualistic. Reality consists of two irreducible elements: one good, the spiritual world (the realm of light); and the other evil, matter (the realm of darkness). Two supreme powers or gods oppose each other the unknowable and ineffable god, from whom a series of lesser divinities emanated, and the evil god, or demiurge, who produced the universe from foul matter and possesses it with his evil demons.
Man is composed of body, soul and spirit. The spirit is man's true self, a "divine spark," a portion of the godhead. In a tragic fall, man's true self, or spirit, was thrown into this dark world and imprisoned in each individual's body and soul. The demiurge and the demons keep man's spirit as a slave of the material world, ignorant of his "divine" condition. Hence the need for a spiritual savior, a messiah or "Christ," to offer redeeming gnosis. This savior is a guide, a master who teaches a few "spiritual" people the Gnostics about their true spiritual selves and helps them to wake up from the dream world they live in. The Gnostics would be released from the material world, the non-Gnostics doomed to reincarnation.
What is an example of how these beliefs are embodied in popular stories? Consider the Star Wars movies. There is much good in them. The stories are admirable in many ways. But they are chock-full of Gnosticism.
Star Wars is the clash between the two supreme powers of the universe "the force" and the "dark side of the force," which is exploited by the "emperor" (the demiurge) and his demons (Darth Vader, the siths). The Gnostic heroes are the Jedi, who possess the "secret knowledge" of their own spiritual powers; unlike the non-Gnostic, they are able to use "the force" well. Each Jedi has a master, who trains him to acquire this redeeming gnosis. Ben Kenobi, for instance, was for a time the master of Anakin and Luke Skywalker. The greatest spiritual guide in the saga is Yoda, a respected senior member of the Jedi council and a general in the clone wars.
As Christ's followers, we must sort out the good seed from the weeds (cf. Matthew 13:24-30). I propose a distinction between the Gnostic values and its philosophy.
Gnostics promote, without a doubt, positive values. They draw a clear-cut separation between good and evil, stress man's spiritual dimension, instill high and noble ideals, foster courage and concern for others, respect nature, reject materialism and often reject hedonism, too.
Such values shine like pearls in an age of moral relativism that thirsts for gain, the ephemeral, the hedonistic. Aren't these some of the virtues and ideas we love in Star Wars and Harry Potter?
The other side of the coin, however, is not so positive. The good values are rooted in a Gnostic philosophical understanding of man, God and the world that is, as the Pope put it, "in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian." Why?
Note the opposite views. The Christian Creator is love a Trinity of persons who wants to establish with us a personal relationship of love quite different from that unknowable God, usually conceived, like the Star Wars "force," as an impersonal energy to be manipulated.
The God of Revelation made everything good the angels, the world, our body and soul. Evil is not a force of the same rank as God; rather, it springs from angels' and men's personal free choice. Salvation is offered by God in Christ, man's only redeemer.
Salvation is a grace a free gift from God that Man can neither deserve nor earn. It is not gnosis, "secret knowledge" we can acquire by ourselves with the help of mere human guides or Christlike figures. In short, the Christian religion is a "dialogue" of love between God and man, not a self-centered "monologue" in which man divinizes himself. That's why John Paul says Gnosticism cannot lead "toward a renewal of religion."
It distorts God's word, "replacing it with purely human words."
Then and Now
Finally, the Pope alludes to the historic span and manifestations of this ideology. "Gnosticism," he says, "never completely abandoned the realm of Christianity sometimes taking the shape of philosophical movement but more often assuming the characteristics of a religion or para-religion."
Let's look at a few representative Gnostic movements in history.
With the rise of Christianity, ancient esoteric ideas developed into Gnostic syncretism. Thus, in the first centuries A.D., the Apostles and the Church Fathers had to combat several "Christian" Gnostic religious systems, such as those of Cerinthus, Manander, Saturninus, Valentinus, Basilides, Ptolemaeus and the ones contained in the apocryphal gospels: of truth and perfection, and of Judas (Iscariot), Philip and Thomas.
The third-century dualist Manichaean church or religion spread from Persia throughout the Middle East, China, southern Europe and northern Africa, where the young Augustine temporarily became a convert.
Teachings similar to Manichaeism resurfaced during the Middle Ages in Europe in groups such as the Paulicians (Armenia, seventh century), the Bogomilists (Bulgaria, 10th century), the Cathars or Albigensians (southern France, 12th century), the Jewish Cabala and the metaphysical speculation surrounding alchemy.
Modern times witnessed the resurgence of Gnosticism in philosophical thought the Enlightenment, Hegel's idealism, some existentialist currents, Nazism, Jungian psychology, the theosophical society and Freemasonry.
More recently, Gnosticism has become popular through successful films and novels, such as Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Matrix. It has also gained followers among the ranks of ordinary people through pseudo-religious "movements," such as the New Age and the Raelian cult.
These contemporary Gnostic expressions should certainly inspire us in the good values they promote. At the same time, we should be cautious examine their philosophical background and reject what is incompatible with our Christian faith.
At the beginning of the third millennium we seem to face the same old clash between Christianity and Gnosticism. Both fight to conquer the "soul" of this world the minds and hearts of peoples and cultures.
For this reason, defeating Gnosticism has become an essential task of the New Evangelization. "Against the spirit of the world," the Holy Father says in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, "the Church takes up anew each day a struggle that is none other than the struggle for the world's soul."
Into the Gnostic Wonderland
Morpheus, a man with circular mirrored glasses, approaches Neo Anderson, a young man who feels something is wrong with the world.
"You are a slave, Neo," the man says. "You, like everyone else, were born into bondage kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste or touch. A prison for your mind."
Morpheus holds two pills in his hands one blue, one red.
"This is your last chance; after this, there is no going back," he says. "You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." Neo takes the red pill.
Sounds familiar? It is a memorable scene of the hit movie The Matrix.
Morpheus' offer visualizes what our culture often offers. The blue pill stands for materialistic relativism believing there is no truth nor right and wrong, or, as Morpheus put it, "You believe whatever you want to believe."
Consequently, "You wake in bed" you enjoy yourself in comfort, money, hedonistic pleasures, social success. We often see the blue pill available over the counter in books, colleges, courts, institutions, the media.
The red pill stands for Gnosticism believing reality is ultimately divine and can be manipulated by whoever has "secret knowledge." This is "Wonderland," and it, too, can now be bought over the counter like the blue pill.
Thank God there is a third option Morpheus didn't take into account something neither blue nor red but transparent: Call it water. Water stands for our Christian faith. Christ, the water of life (see John 7:37-39), came to bring us the "living water" of "eternal life" (see John 4:7-13) through the water of baptism.
The blue and red pills counter the effects of water in different ways. Materialistic relativism tries to destroy all objective truths and values. Gnosticism, instead, proposes alternative truths and values. Moreover, it interprets Christianity as esoteric knowledge, not to destroy it but to distort it.
Neo, Vader and Voldemort
First, where is Gnosticism in today's culture? You might bump into it in successful films and novels, such as Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Matrix, or face it in "religious" and "philosophical" movements, such as the New Age, the Raelian cult and Freemasonry.
Note the difference between the three media products and the three movements: The movies and the books do not instill a credo you must believe in if you want to watch, read and enjoy them. In fact, they are commendable in many ways they provide us with elevated entertainment, valuable lessons and admirable heroes.
The movements, instead, are credos one must embrace in order to be an authentic New Ager, Raelian or Mason. As Catholics, we might be inspired by the noble ideals of these movements but not by their philosophy. Their philosophy is "Wonderland." And "Wonderland" is not "Christianland."
What is the Gnostic "Wonderland"?
The story of The Matrix shows it.
Morpheus reveals to Neo that human beings are trapped in a false "reality." Why? Some time ago men created the Matrix, an artificially intelligent entity. Needing man's energy to survive, the Matrix became a computer-generated dreamworld the world we think we live in to enslave men in a huge lab and suck their energy with the help of "agents."
However, a man succeeded in freeing the first human beings and teaching them the truth before he died.
The Oracle (a prophet) predicted this man will return to liberate all people and bring them to Zion, the last human city. Thus, a few freed men and women free others, looking for this man. Morpheus believes Neo to be the One and tries to free his mind so Neo can operate as the savior he is.
Here is the story's translation into the Gnostic worldview:
Two supreme powers or gods fight one another for supremacy. One is the pleroma ("fullness" in Greek) the good unknowable godhead, from whom many spiritual entities called aeons emanated. The other is an evil, deformed god, called the demiurge ("craftsman") that fashioned the flawed universe, along with archons, or demons.
Reality is dualistic. Everything is spiritual, particularly but not solely man's spirit. This is man's own true self, and it is good, for it is a portion of the pleroma's divine essence. Everything material, like man's body, is foul and evil, because it was produced by the demiurge and his demons to keep man's spirit a slave in the material prison of creation. Thus, every human being, knowingly or unknowingly, serves this false god and lives ignorant of his divine condition. His fate is reincarnation.
How does one free oneself from matter and join the divine pleroma? Through secret, esoteric knowledge called gnosis the visionary or mystical awareness of one's own divinity. One becomes a Gnostic by following spiritual guides or masters, historical figures of the "Christ," such as Jesus of Nazareth, Buddha, Moses, Mohammed and Rael.
Review the story of The Matrix and our introductory scene and you will understand the philosophy.
Zion and mankind stand for the pleroma. The Matrix and its "agents" are the demiurge and his archons, who created the illusory world to enslave man and hinder him from realizing their spiritual powers. Morpheus and his crew are the Gnostic. Morpheus is also Neo's guide. Neo will become the ultimate "Christ," the One who will offer redeeming gnosis to the rest of the mortals.
Consider the Star Wars series. "The force" is the good godhead opposed by "the dark side of the force," which the emperor (the demiurge) and his siths (the archons) employ to enslave all peoples. Only the Jedis (the Gnostic) are capable of transcending the physical laws of nature and join "the force" to use it for the salvation of all. Each Jedi acquires gnosis with the help of a master. Yoda, for instance, trained Ben Kenobi, and Ben Kenobi trained Anakin and Luke Skywalker. In the last scene of The Return of the Jedi, you see Yoda, Ben Kenobi and Anakin "saved" "energized" with "the force."
Harry Potter follows a similar pattern. It portrays the clash between the "white" magic (the pleroma) practiced by the witches and wizards (the Gnostic) and the dark arts exploited by the Dark Lord Voldemort (the demiurge) and his followers in the Slytherin House (the demons). Every professor at Hogwarts is, of course, a master, with Albus Dumbledore as the school headmaster. The non-Gnostic are called the Muggles, ignorant human beings who, like the Dursley family, are subject to the laws of the material world.
We expect Harry Potter to finally become the "Christ," the savior. Note the boy never becomes a wizard and never acquires magic powers. He only becomes aware, through training, that he is a wizard and has these powers from birth. That's gnosis.
Most people who enjoy these three popular sagas might be inspired by their positive values but do not take their Gnostic wonderland seriously. But to leave fiction and enter the New Age movement, the Raelian religion or Freemasonry requires a "conversion" of the initiated. To join, you must swallow the red pill.
The pleroma is the Mason's inaccessible great architect and his divinities, the New Agers' impersonal "energy" or the Raelians' community of wise extraterrestrial scientists called Elohim who created all life on earth 25,000 years ago. The three groups identify the demiurge with all "dogmatic" churches and religions but especially with the Catholic Church with her archons (the Church leaders and particularly the Pope) she traps men in the false "reality" of Christian Revelation, hindering them from the self-consciousness of their own divinity.
The Gnostic are the Masons, the New Agers, the Raelians. Many historical figures have incarnated the "Christ," known as Maitreya in Masonic and New Age circles and as Rael ("the messenger") among Raelians.
Water or the Red Pill?
On the surface Gnostic wonderlands might look Christian they promote religiosity, spiritual values, concern for others, respect for nature, the sense of mission, rejection of materialistic relativism. How can we discern if a movie, a novel, a movement or an organization is rooted in a Gnostic or in a Christian worldview?
We need to examine its underlying concept of God, man and the world. First, God: Is God the only supreme good power or is there another evil force of the same rank? Is God somebody with whom we have a personal relationship of love or something like a force to be used? Is Jesus of Nazareth the only savior or are there many "Christs"?
Second, check the notion of man: Is he a loved creature or a portion of divinity to be freed? Is man a unity of body and soul or just a spirit imprisoned in a body? Does man's salvation come from a gratuitous gift of God (grace) or from "secret knowledge" acquired by training (gnosis)?
Third, think of the world: Is creation good and real or evil and illusory a sort of prison?
The answers unveil the pervading philosophy. A fictional story, of course, does not need to present the Christian truths. The question is whether or not there is room for a Christian worldview in the story.
Mark this substantial difference: A red pill is a man-made drug that may fail to cure; water, instead, is a God-made basic element for life. Gnosticism is a man-made self-centered philosophy a "monologue" in which man divinizes himself and fails in the attempt. The Christian revelation is a God-made gift "dialogue" of love that God establishes with man for eternal life.
The Christian revelation is Christ. To definitively discern what is Christian from what is not use what I call "St. John's criterion": "By this you know the spirit of God: Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world" (2 John 4:2-3).
At the beginning of the third millennium three worldviews compete to conquer the minds and hearts of peoples and cultures, the world's soul: materialistic relativism, Gnosticism and Christianity. The blue pill is easy to recognize. But the red pill is often dissolved in apparent water.
The New Evangelization demands a clear-cut separation between Gnosticism and Christianity if we want to bring every thirsty person to the Water of Life.
Acknowledgement:
Father Alfonso Aguilar. "Gnosticism and the Struggle for the World's Soul." National Catholic Register. (April 6-12, 2003)
"Thy nativity, O Christ our God,
has shown to the world the light of wisdom;
for by it, those who worshipped the stars
were taught by a star to adore Thee
the Sun of Righteousness,
and to know Thee, the Orient from on high.
O Lord, glory to Thee."
Troparion of The Nativity of Jesus Christ
has shown to the world the light of wisdom;
for by it, those who worshipped the stars
were taught by a star to adore Thee
the Sun of Righteousness,
and to know Thee, the Orient from on high.
O Lord, glory to Thee."
Troparion of The Nativity of Jesus Christ
The Lessons of Christmas: Incarnation, Not Enlightenment
December 22, 2017 by Joseph Torres
Waiting. I have vivid childhood memories of Christmas Eves spent looking under the Christmas tree, curiously trying to figure out what was inside the carefully wrapped boxes. Was it the toy truck I couldn’t stop talking about? Was it the action figure I spotted at the department store that I just knew I “had” to have? Were my parents really listening to me when I passionately expressed my longings?
God’s Old Covenant people eagerly waited for a promised gift. Was God really listening to his people when they passionately expressed their longing for deliverance and redemption? During Christmas we celebrate the end of Israel’s waiting, and the arrival of Jesus Christ, the One whose appearing was so monumental that Western civilization has literally split its division of history around the perceived date of his birth.
Unfortunately, our commercializing culture has obscured the truest meaning of this holiday. Even Christians can be affected. Christmas is a season with deep theological implications. Beyond the joy of celebrating mere family get-togethers, the customary exchange of gifts, the delicious food, or even the vague sense of universal peace with all people based on little more than our common humanity–Christmas pushes further.
Christmas is radical. Christmas reminds us that our God gets his hands dirty. The infinite,personal God of the Bible isn’t a force. He punishes the wicked, but he also reconciles the lost. The invisible, immortal, intangible Word of God took on human flesh. By this in-fleshing, this incarnation, God the Son took on a new mode of existence marked by weakness, vulnerability, and mortality.”[1] Jesus did this, in the words of the Nicene Creed (325 AD), “For us and for our salvation.” The birth of Jesus is by far the greatest announcement humanity has ever received.
What Christmas Teaches us about Reality Oneism, with its denial of the Creator-creature distinction, cannot be squared with the truth of Christmas. It leaves us forever waiting for a redemption that never finally arrives. Behind the holiday spectacles lie powerful Twoist truths. Embracing these truths moves us away from the cosmic confusion of Oneism, and plants us firmly on the unshakable ground of gospel truth. This is because the drama of Christmas addresses the root of our greatest problem, answers our greatest need, and presents the greatest news imaginable.
Lesson 1: Our Problem is Our Love of Sinful Affections, Not a Lack of Self-Awareness Oneism appears in many forms, but they all insist that there is no true distinction between Creator and creature. Enlightenment is not given to us as a gift by from someone or something outside of ourselves. It comes from an awakening to our truest self, an awareness of the inner spark of the divine that runs through all people. Ignorance of self, not estrangement from God, is the great problem to be overcome, according to Oneism.
In sharp contrast, Twoism teaches us that our problem–the problem for which it was necessary for God himself to get involved–is our estrangement from the Creator due to our sin. The very essence of sin reveals the nature of reality. Theologian Millard J. Erickson summarizes biblical imagery for sin as including “missing the mark, irreligion, transgression, iniquity or lack of integrity, rebellion, treachery, perversion, and abomination.”[2] He likewise defines the essence of sin in terms of sensuality, selfishness, and the displacement of God.[3]
The root of human suffering is not ignorance of our inner divinity. When humanity embraced autonomy, the human and divine relationship was broken. War, injustice, racism, sexism, slavery, manipulation, theft, and sex trafficking are all expressions of the sinful, anti-God impulse. Having turned against our Creator, and therefore against one other–those made in the image of the Creator. We are indeed estranged from ourselves, but not because we just haven’t realized that we are divine. We are estranged because we refuse to acknowledge our creaturehood (Rom. 1:21).
We cannot be our own Christmas heroes. The woes of the world are our own doing. The solution must come from somewhere else. and this brings us to our second Christmas lesson.
Lesson 2: Don’t Look Within, Look to Him
Christmas reveals our greatest need. As D. A. Carson said, if we had needed an economist, entertainer, politician, or doctor, God would have sent one of those to deliver us. Instead, God “perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.”[4]
We don’t need a shaman, a guru, or a yogi. We only do ourselves harm when we seek solutions to the world’s problem from the well of our own resources. We need a prophet to speak truth, a priest to take up our cause with God, and a king to defeat our enemies.During Christmas we do not lift our gaze to the pinnacle of human spirituality with the hope of finally reaching enlightenment. Christmas is not about good advice. It is good news.
Christmas marks the launching of God’s kingdom and of God’s redemptive deathblow against the powers of sin, sickness, suffering, and Satan. During this time of year, we–like the shepherds of Luke’s Gospel–reflect on the glorious announcement of the arrival of Jesus Christ as king and redeemer. God has come in person. This gospel was the hope of God’s people surrounded by pagan Rome two thousand years ago, and remains the only hope of his people in the re-paganized west today.
So, though we continue to wait, we now wait in hope for the glorious return of the king.
[1] J. van Genderen and W. H. Velema,
Concise Reformed Dogmatics (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), 474.
[2] Millard J. Erickson,
Christian Theology, Third Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 423.
[3] Erickson,
Christian Theology, 423.
[4] D.A. Carson,
A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1992), 109.
December 22, 2017 by Joseph Torres
Waiting. I have vivid childhood memories of Christmas Eves spent looking under the Christmas tree, curiously trying to figure out what was inside the carefully wrapped boxes. Was it the toy truck I couldn’t stop talking about? Was it the action figure I spotted at the department store that I just knew I “had” to have? Were my parents really listening to me when I passionately expressed my longings?
God’s Old Covenant people eagerly waited for a promised gift. Was God really listening to his people when they passionately expressed their longing for deliverance and redemption? During Christmas we celebrate the end of Israel’s waiting, and the arrival of Jesus Christ, the One whose appearing was so monumental that Western civilization has literally split its division of history around the perceived date of his birth.
Unfortunately, our commercializing culture has obscured the truest meaning of this holiday. Even Christians can be affected. Christmas is a season with deep theological implications. Beyond the joy of celebrating mere family get-togethers, the customary exchange of gifts, the delicious food, or even the vague sense of universal peace with all people based on little more than our common humanity–Christmas pushes further.
Christmas is radical. Christmas reminds us that our God gets his hands dirty. The infinite,personal God of the Bible isn’t a force. He punishes the wicked, but he also reconciles the lost. The invisible, immortal, intangible Word of God took on human flesh. By this in-fleshing, this incarnation, God the Son took on a new mode of existence marked by weakness, vulnerability, and mortality.”[1] Jesus did this, in the words of the Nicene Creed (325 AD), “For us and for our salvation.” The birth of Jesus is by far the greatest announcement humanity has ever received.
What Christmas Teaches us about Reality Oneism, with its denial of the Creator-creature distinction, cannot be squared with the truth of Christmas. It leaves us forever waiting for a redemption that never finally arrives. Behind the holiday spectacles lie powerful Twoist truths. Embracing these truths moves us away from the cosmic confusion of Oneism, and plants us firmly on the unshakable ground of gospel truth. This is because the drama of Christmas addresses the root of our greatest problem, answers our greatest need, and presents the greatest news imaginable.
Lesson 1: Our Problem is Our Love of Sinful Affections, Not a Lack of Self-Awareness Oneism appears in many forms, but they all insist that there is no true distinction between Creator and creature. Enlightenment is not given to us as a gift by from someone or something outside of ourselves. It comes from an awakening to our truest self, an awareness of the inner spark of the divine that runs through all people. Ignorance of self, not estrangement from God, is the great problem to be overcome, according to Oneism.
In sharp contrast, Twoism teaches us that our problem–the problem for which it was necessary for God himself to get involved–is our estrangement from the Creator due to our sin. The very essence of sin reveals the nature of reality. Theologian Millard J. Erickson summarizes biblical imagery for sin as including “missing the mark, irreligion, transgression, iniquity or lack of integrity, rebellion, treachery, perversion, and abomination.”[2] He likewise defines the essence of sin in terms of sensuality, selfishness, and the displacement of God.[3]
The root of human suffering is not ignorance of our inner divinity. When humanity embraced autonomy, the human and divine relationship was broken. War, injustice, racism, sexism, slavery, manipulation, theft, and sex trafficking are all expressions of the sinful, anti-God impulse. Having turned against our Creator, and therefore against one other–those made in the image of the Creator. We are indeed estranged from ourselves, but not because we just haven’t realized that we are divine. We are estranged because we refuse to acknowledge our creaturehood (Rom. 1:21).
We cannot be our own Christmas heroes. The woes of the world are our own doing. The solution must come from somewhere else. and this brings us to our second Christmas lesson.
Lesson 2: Don’t Look Within, Look to Him
Christmas reveals our greatest need. As D. A. Carson said, if we had needed an economist, entertainer, politician, or doctor, God would have sent one of those to deliver us. Instead, God “perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.”[4]
We don’t need a shaman, a guru, or a yogi. We only do ourselves harm when we seek solutions to the world’s problem from the well of our own resources. We need a prophet to speak truth, a priest to take up our cause with God, and a king to defeat our enemies.During Christmas we do not lift our gaze to the pinnacle of human spirituality with the hope of finally reaching enlightenment. Christmas is not about good advice. It is good news.
Christmas marks the launching of God’s kingdom and of God’s redemptive deathblow against the powers of sin, sickness, suffering, and Satan. During this time of year, we–like the shepherds of Luke’s Gospel–reflect on the glorious announcement of the arrival of Jesus Christ as king and redeemer. God has come in person. This gospel was the hope of God’s people surrounded by pagan Rome two thousand years ago, and remains the only hope of his people in the re-paganized west today.
So, though we continue to wait, we now wait in hope for the glorious return of the king.
[1] J. van Genderen and W. H. Velema,
Concise Reformed Dogmatics (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), 474.
[2] Millard J. Erickson,
Christian Theology, Third Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 423.
[3] Erickson,
Christian Theology, 423.
[4] D.A. Carson,
A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1992), 109.
I’m a Pediatrician. Here’s What I Did When a Little Boy Patient Said He Was a Girl.
By Michelle Cretella, M.D.
“Congratulations, it’s a boy!” Or, “Congratulations, it’s a girl!”
As a pediatrician for nearly 20 years, that’s how many of my patient relationships began. Our bodies declare our sex.
Biological sex is not assigned. Sex is determined at conception by our DNA and is stamped into every cell of our bodies. Human sexuality is binary. You either have a normal Y chromosome, and develop into a male, or you don’t, and you will develop into a female. There are at least 6,500 genetic differences between men and women. Hormones and surgery cannot change this.
An identity is not biological, it is psychological. It has to do with thinking and feeling. Thoughts and feelings are not biologically hardwired. Our thinking and feeling may be factually right or factually wrong.
If I walk into my doctor’s office today and say, “Hi, I’m Margaret Thatcher,” my physician will say I am delusional and give me an anti-psychotic. Yet, if instead, I walked in and said, “I’m a man,” he would say, “Congratulations, you’re transgender.”
If I were to say, “Doc, I am suicidal because I’m an amputee trapped in a normal body, please cut off my leg,” I will be diagnosed with body identity integrity disorder. But if I walk into that doctor’s office and say, “I am a man, sign me up for a double mastectomy,” my physician will. See, if you want to cut off a leg or an arm you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a penis, you’re transgender.
No one is born transgender. If gender identity were hardwired in the brain before birth, identical twins would have the same gender identity 100 percent of the time. But they don’t.
I had one patient we’ll call Andy. Between the ages of 3 and 5, he increasingly played with girls and “girl toys” and said he was a girl. I referred the parents and Andy to a therapist. Sometimes mental illness of a parent or abuse of the child are factors, but more commonly, the child has misperceived family dynamics and internalized a false belief.
In the middle of one session, Andy put down the toy truck, held onto a Barbie, and said, “Mommy and Daddy, you don’t love me when I’m a boy.” When Andy was 3, his sister with special needs was born, and required significantly more of his parents’ attention. Andy misperceived this as “Mommy and Daddy love girls. If I want them to love me, I have to be a girl.” With family therapy Andy got better.
Today, Andy’s parents would be told, “This is who Andy really is. You must ensure that everyone treats him as a girl, or else he will commit suicide.”
As Andy approaches puberty, the experts would put him on puberty blockers so he can continue to impersonate a girl.
It doesn’t matter that we’ve never tested puberty blockers in biologically normal children. It doesn’t matter that when blockers are used to treat prostate cancer in men, and gynecological problems in women, they cause problems with memory. We don’t need testing. We need to arrest his physical development now, or he will kill himself.
But this is not true. Instead, when supported in their biological sex through natural puberty, the vast majority of gender-confused children get better. Yet, we chemically castrate gender-confused children with puberty blockers. Then we permanently sterilize many of them by adding cross-sex hormones, which also put them at risk for heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancers, and even the very emotional problems that the gender experts claim to be treating.
P.S. If a girl who insists she is male has been on testosterone daily for one year, she is cleared to get a bilateral mastectomy at age 16. Mind you, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently came out with a report that urges pediatricians to caution teenagers about getting tattoos because they are essentially permanent and can cause scarring. But this same AAP is 110 percent in support of 16-year-old girls getting a double mastectomy, even without parental consent, so long as the girl insists that she is a man, and has been taking testosterone daily for one year.
To indoctrinate all children from preschool forward with the lie that they could be trapped in the wrong body disrupts the very foundation of a child’s reality testing. If they can’t trust the reality of their physical bodies, who or what can they trust? Transgender ideology in schools is psychological abuse that often leads to chemical castration, sterilization, and surgical mutilation.
Michelle Cretella, M.D., is president of the American College of Pediatricians, a national organization of pediatricians and other health care professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children.
By Michelle Cretella, M.D.
“Congratulations, it’s a boy!” Or, “Congratulations, it’s a girl!”
As a pediatrician for nearly 20 years, that’s how many of my patient relationships began. Our bodies declare our sex.
Biological sex is not assigned. Sex is determined at conception by our DNA and is stamped into every cell of our bodies. Human sexuality is binary. You either have a normal Y chromosome, and develop into a male, or you don’t, and you will develop into a female. There are at least 6,500 genetic differences between men and women. Hormones and surgery cannot change this.
An identity is not biological, it is psychological. It has to do with thinking and feeling. Thoughts and feelings are not biologically hardwired. Our thinking and feeling may be factually right or factually wrong.
If I walk into my doctor’s office today and say, “Hi, I’m Margaret Thatcher,” my physician will say I am delusional and give me an anti-psychotic. Yet, if instead, I walked in and said, “I’m a man,” he would say, “Congratulations, you’re transgender.”
If I were to say, “Doc, I am suicidal because I’m an amputee trapped in a normal body, please cut off my leg,” I will be diagnosed with body identity integrity disorder. But if I walk into that doctor’s office and say, “I am a man, sign me up for a double mastectomy,” my physician will. See, if you want to cut off a leg or an arm you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a penis, you’re transgender.
No one is born transgender. If gender identity were hardwired in the brain before birth, identical twins would have the same gender identity 100 percent of the time. But they don’t.
I had one patient we’ll call Andy. Between the ages of 3 and 5, he increasingly played with girls and “girl toys” and said he was a girl. I referred the parents and Andy to a therapist. Sometimes mental illness of a parent or abuse of the child are factors, but more commonly, the child has misperceived family dynamics and internalized a false belief.
In the middle of one session, Andy put down the toy truck, held onto a Barbie, and said, “Mommy and Daddy, you don’t love me when I’m a boy.” When Andy was 3, his sister with special needs was born, and required significantly more of his parents’ attention. Andy misperceived this as “Mommy and Daddy love girls. If I want them to love me, I have to be a girl.” With family therapy Andy got better.
Today, Andy’s parents would be told, “This is who Andy really is. You must ensure that everyone treats him as a girl, or else he will commit suicide.”
As Andy approaches puberty, the experts would put him on puberty blockers so he can continue to impersonate a girl.
It doesn’t matter that we’ve never tested puberty blockers in biologically normal children. It doesn’t matter that when blockers are used to treat prostate cancer in men, and gynecological problems in women, they cause problems with memory. We don’t need testing. We need to arrest his physical development now, or he will kill himself.
But this is not true. Instead, when supported in their biological sex through natural puberty, the vast majority of gender-confused children get better. Yet, we chemically castrate gender-confused children with puberty blockers. Then we permanently sterilize many of them by adding cross-sex hormones, which also put them at risk for heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancers, and even the very emotional problems that the gender experts claim to be treating.
P.S. If a girl who insists she is male has been on testosterone daily for one year, she is cleared to get a bilateral mastectomy at age 16. Mind you, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently came out with a report that urges pediatricians to caution teenagers about getting tattoos because they are essentially permanent and can cause scarring. But this same AAP is 110 percent in support of 16-year-old girls getting a double mastectomy, even without parental consent, so long as the girl insists that she is a man, and has been taking testosterone daily for one year.
To indoctrinate all children from preschool forward with the lie that they could be trapped in the wrong body disrupts the very foundation of a child’s reality testing. If they can’t trust the reality of their physical bodies, who or what can they trust? Transgender ideology in schools is psychological abuse that often leads to chemical castration, sterilization, and surgical mutilation.
Michelle Cretella, M.D., is president of the American College of Pediatricians, a national organization of pediatricians and other health care professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children.
The Necessity of Iconography and the Idolatry of (false) Gnosticism
by Fr. John A. Peck
How Dogmatic Iconography defends the doctrine of the Incarnation against ancient Gnosticism.
Harold Bloom, in his book, The American Religion, rightly comes to the startling conclusion that America is a nation of Gnostics, believers in a pre-Christian tradition of individual divinity. The American propensity to be religious iconoclasts on the one hand, and cultural idolators on the other is a stark and broken contrast with Incarnational Christianity.
Despite protestations to the contrary, it is not the icon which is so offensive to Gnostics and iconoclasts, it is the message which the icon represents which cannot be tolerated.
Secular Iconography
Political Iconography
Sports teams all have logos, pictures and posters of famous players, their own sayings and their own traditions. A high degree of religiosity plays an important part in sports propaganda worldwide. Politics have always used religiosity and iconography, even those who were religious iconoclasts. In communist countries in the last century, giant ‘parades’ (religious processions) with posters (icons) of the glorious leader, the little red books containing the ‘catechism’ of the political movement, and the religious fervor of classic Gnostics (agree, obey or suffer) all were part and parcel of secularist societies. But these were simply replacements for Orthodox icons, Orthodox Christian festal processions, Bibles and prayerbooks. The icons, in this case, were not just destroyed, but deliberately replaced with ‘atheist’ iconography. Because it was based on a falsehood – that the state is supreme – it could not last. Indeed, we see much of the same kind of tactic going on today in America. It is doomed to the same historical failure
Christian Dogmatic Iconography
Before the Incarnation, it was idolatrous to make an image of God. Now that the Incarnation has taken place, it would be idolatrous not to make images of Him.
For example, Muslims reject the Incarnation – the doctrine that God Himself took a human body, mind, soul, spirit – God became a man. Therefore, mosques have bare walls and no images of God. Under their influence, and the resurgence of Gnosticism, many civil authorities in the past engaged in religious iconoclasm. This state-sponsored iconoclasm (literally “image smashing”) was countered by St. John of Damascus (d. 749), Germanus I, Patriarch of Constantinople (d. 732), and St. Theodore the Studite (d. 826), who marshaled scripture and theological thinking in favor of the use of icons in Christian worship. John of Damascus argued that God was the first and original image-maker of the universe and that the son of God was the living image of God in his very nature. Since Paul in the Epistle to the Colossians had written,
“He is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15),
the worship of the icon of Jesus Christ was not idolatrous, because, in the oft-quoted formula of Saint Basil of Caesarea (d. 379) in De Spiritu Sancto (On the Holy Spirit),
“The honor paid to the image [the Son] passes over to the prototype [the Father].”
When a religion rejects images of God, it confirms the message that God is only a spirit, and that He has no physical body. Before the Incarnation, that was true. After the Incarnation, it is false, and is therefore, as false worship, idolatry. Idolatry is worshipping false gods, or worshipping the True God while misrepresenting Him.
In ancient Israel, when people worshiped Baal, Ashtoreth, and Moloch, they committed the first form of idolatry. These are all false gods, and it is idolatry to worship them in any way whatsoever, either with or without images. When the Israelites worshiped the golden calf, they committed the second form of idolatry. They correctly noted the identity of the true God, but they grossly misrepresented Him. Instead of recognizing God as an invisible Spirit, the Israelites made a golden calf, they praised it for delivering them from Egypt, and they even called the calf “Yahweh”.
Idol Worship by Any Other Name
When the Israelites sinned with the golden calf, they were still correct that God’s name is “Yahweh”. They were correct that Yahweh had delivered them from Egypt. And they were correct to praise Yahweh. But their worship was turned into idolatry, because they misrepresented Him. God is not a cow, nor does He look like one. Similarly, when heterodox Christians worship with bare walls and an absence of icons, they are correct that God’s name is “Jesus”. They are correct that Jesus came to deliver them from sin. And they are correct to praise Jesus. But their worship is turned into idolatry, because they misrepresent Him. God is no longer a faceless spirit.
Before God became incarnate in the womb of Mary, He had no human body. Images of God were therefore forbidden, because they misrepresented God, but now that God has become incarnate, our worship must reflect this important fact. Otherwise, if we misrepresent God, we become idolaters.
Misrepresenting God: A Grievous Sin
In ancient Israel, God did not want His people bowing down before images of Himself, because any image of Him they made would be misrepresenting Him. But He knew that people needed to bow down before something, so He provided the Temple in Jerusalem for this purpose.
The temple did not represent the image of God, but it did represent His presence.
So God had His people bow down toward the temple:
But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house. I will bow down toward your holy temple in the fear of you. (Psalm 5:7)
Anticipating the day when He would become incarnate, when His people would be able to have images of Himself, God taught His people to include many images in the context of worship. The Jerusalem temple included icons of angels, and early synagogues were covered with icons of many Old Testament saints. The Word had not yet become flesh, so God’s people venerated the Word of God contained in Scripture. Even to this day, Jews bow toward the Torah scrolls when entering/exiting the synagogue, and also during special Torah services. Jews also kiss the Torah to venerate it.
Before the coming of Christ, the Jewish Temple signified God’s presence, and His people bowed down toward it. Before the Incarnation, it was impossible to make an image of the invisible God, a heavenly reality, without misrepresenting Him. Once, however, God became flesh in the Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, the invisible God became visible, the immaterial God was suddenly approachable. As is sung in the Nativity hymns of the Orthodox Church during Christmas,
- The uncontainable God is contained in a cave and lies in a manger,
- The unapproachable God summons the Magi to Him,
- The untouchable God nurses at His mother’s breast,
- The invisible God is seen by shepherds, etc.
It is the reality of the Incarnation which iconography, as sure as the written Scriptures and the liturgical hymns of the Church throughout the ages, protect, defend and guarantee that Christ is understood in one way and one way only – as God the Word come in the flesh.
After Christ came, He referred to His own body as the true Temple. Therefore, instead of continuing to bow down toward a temple building, we now bow down toward images of Jesus. This is not worship of the icon – perish the thought! No Orthodox Christian thinks a piece of wood created heaven and earth. We also bow to one another, because Scripture says that every Orthodox Christian is a temple of the Holy Spirit. When Orthodox Christians bow to an icon of Christ, they are reminded that God is now forever united to a body – the physical flesh of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is fully God, and fully human, and He is physically seated in Heaven even today. Orthodox worship represents God correctly.
Blonde-Haired, Blue-eyed, Jesus
Not a Dogmatic Icon
When others, including heterodox Christians, refuse to bow to icons of Christ, and they choose to bow down before nothing instead, their worship suggests that God has no body, and that the Incarnation hasn’t happened. Their worship misrepresents God. They are bowing down before a faceless idol.
What the Icon Isn’t and What it Is
The Icon is not a ‘holy picture’ designed to increase piety. Neither is an icon something spiritual in itself, as it does not depict “God” in general. The icon is a dogmatic expression of a theological truth. It is, therefore, not variable as artists would claim by ‘artistic license’ – a term I, as an artist, have always found to be a cop out for lack of talent or lack of vision.
Not a Dogmatic Icon of Christ
Just as one cannot translate the Bible any old way one wishes to and still remain true to the text, one cannot paint an icon any old way one wishes to and still remain true to the prototype.
There are no dogmatic icons of Jesus as Chinese or Jamaican, or with blonde hair and blue eyes. He must always be depicted as he was visible on the earth – a first century Jewish rabbi.
By the same token, the icon is far more than just an attempt to capture a historical person or event. The icon shows the spiritual truth or heavenly reality – not just the image or ‘snapshot’ of history.
Therefore, we never see icons of saints who wore glasses in which they are wearing their glasses. Why not? Presumably, no one wears glasses in heaven, where all may gaze and contemplate upon the glories of heaven.
In the most convincing words of John of Damascus:
“We have passed the stage of infancy, and reached the perfection of manhood. We receive our habit of mind from God, and know what may be imaged and what may not. The Scripture says, “You have not seen the likeness of Him.” (Ex. 33.20) What wisdom in the law-giver. How depict the invisible? How picture the inconceivable? How give expression to the limitless, the immeasurable, the invisible? How give a form to immensity? How paint immortality? How localize mystery? It is clear that when you contemplate God, who is a pure spirit, becoming man for your sake, you will be able to clothe Him with the human form.
When the Invisible One becomes visible to flesh (as in the Incarnation of God in the flesh – John 1:14), you may then draw a likeness of His form. When He who is a pure spirit, without form or limit, immeasurable in the boundlessness of His own nature, existing as God, takes upon Himself the form of a servant in substance and in stature, and a body of flesh, then you may draw His likeness, and show it to anyone willing to contemplate it.
Depict His ineffable condescension, His virginal birth, His baptism in the Jordan, His transfiguration on Tabor, His all-powerful sufferings, His death and miracles, the proofs of His Godhead, the deeds which He worked in the flesh through divine power, His saving Cross, His Sepulchre, and Resurrection, and ascent into heaven. Give to it all the endurance of engraving and color. Have no fear or anxiety.”
Indeed, we see that as American Gnosticism strains to invent a distant, amorphous and ahistorical “concept of God,” Who can never be seen or heard or heard from, it is precisely the dogmatic icon, depicting Christ as He appeared in time, in history, on the earth and among men, which guarantees the Truth of the historical Incarnation that God became flesh and dwelt among us.
The reality is that American Gnosticism clearly denies the objective presence of Christ in the World through Church, Sacrament, and Creed – all vehicles for remaining ‘on the mark’ so to speak. In short, it attempts to make the Incarnation irrelevant.
It is the dogmatic icon which destroys the idolatrous fantasy of Gnostic relativism, and which is, therefore, intolerable to any Gnostic or even to any Christian with Gnostic tendencies. And so it is.
When the Word became flesh, iconoclasm became idolatry. The Incarnation changes everything.
The Case of Charlie Gard: Parental Rights Under Attack
July 17, 2017
A symbolic case for the defense of the life in front of the modern ideology where natural law, positive law, and financial interest are used and abused.
The Tragic Case So Far
Charlie has an exceptionally rare genetic condition called encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDDS). Although he appeared perfectly healthy when he was born, his health soon began to deteriorate. Charlie now has severe brain damage which is considered today irreversible. He cannot swallow on his own, open his eyes, hear, or move his arms or legs. He is unable to breathe unaided, which is why he requires a ventilator. Charlie's heart, liver, and kidneys are also affected and it is not clear if he feels pain. Charlie is baptized.
Charlie's parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, from Bedfont in west London, want Charlie to have an experimental treatment called nucleoside therapy. A hospital in the United States has agreed to offer Charlie the treatment, and Charlie's parents have raised funds to take him there.
But Charlie's doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) do not agree with this course of treatment for Charlie. They say they have explored various treatment options, including nucleoside drug therapy, and none would improve Charlie's quality of life. They say Charlie's life support should be switched off and he should be allowed to die.
The Legal Battle
GOSH applied to the High Court for judges to decide Charlie's future. The High Court agreed with the GOSH doctors. Charlie's parents then appealed against the decision, but the Court of Appeal (May 25) and Supreme Court (June 8) ruled that the original decision should stand and that it would be in Charlie's best interests to be allowed to die with dignity. On June 27, the judges in the European Court of Human Rights refuse to intervene. After the ruling, Yates and Gard claimed the hospital had denied permission for them to take Charlie back to their home to die.
Two international hospitals and their researchers have been in touch with GOSH with more information about nucleoside therapy—drugs designed to help treat MDDS.
Meanwhile, on July 3, the Pope and U.S. President Donald Trump offered to intervene and support Charlie's parents' plea.
Natural Law and Parental Rights
Because the family is a natural and divine institution, the parents are the first educators and decision makers for their children. It belongs to them to provide for and protect the life of which they are procreators.
Civil authority, whether national or international, has the right and duty to use its own organs and means to preserve, defend, and foster the goods of the family, even by positively helping them, especially in the support and education of children, according to what the common good requires (cf. Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri).
In the case of Charlie, GOSH and the English Courts ignored and unjustly deprived Charlie’s parents of their natural rights:
- To decide about the care of their child
- To have him dying at home
- To apply extraordinary means to attempt to maintain his life.
Ordinary Versus Extraordinary Means
If the fifth Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," imposes the obligation to preserve life, it does not oblige using extraordinary means to artificially maintain a body which is too irreversibly damaged to sustain life by natural means. The goal of our life is not to preserve our earthly life at all cost but to attain God.
The whole difficulty consists in determining what are the extraordinary means for a particular case.
Pius XII affirmed clearly that the respirator for a dying patient can be considered an extraordinary means. Modern theologians and moralist, unfortunately, have been distorting the Church’s doctrine on this matter, leaving the faithful confused.
Paglia from Pontifical Academy for Life
On June 29, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life published the following statement:
We must do what advances the health of the patient, but we must also accept the limits of medicine and, as stated in paragraph 65 of the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae, avoid aggressive medical procedures that are disproportionate to any expected results or excessively burdensome to the patient or the family.”
However, in Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II expressed the traditional teaching of the Church about the use of extraordinary means to preserve life. Unlike Paglia, John Paul II did not declare a positive obligation to avoid extraordinary treatment It is licit to avoid extraordinary means, “one can in conscience” refuse them, but one is not obliged to refuse them. Here are John Paul II’s words.
Euthanasia must be distinguished from the decision to forego so-called ‘aggressive medical treatment,’ in other words, medical procedures which no longer correspond to the real situation of the patient, either because they are by now disproportionate to any expected results or because they impose an excessive burden on the patient and his family. In such situations, when death is clearly imminent and inevitable, one can in conscience ‘refuse forms of treatment that would only secure a precarious and burdensome prolongation of life, so long as the normal care due to the sick person in similar cases is not interrupted.’”
Ideologies Behind the Case
Italian Cardinal Elio Sgreccia, former President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, came to the defense of the traditional position of the Church with strong words. He offered “10 Critical Points” for consideration in the Italian daily La Stampa, on Monday, July 3, 2017.
He reminds the faithful in particular that people who cannot be cured have the right to be taken care of. The right to dignity applies also to newborns, regardless of the state of their health. This particular dignity includes the right to care and attention. Feeding and hydration are not therapies; they cannot be withdrawn. Doctors and patients (in this case Charlie’s parents on his behalf) must be actively involved in the decision process and not have to “suffer passively the decision and choices of others.” Charlie needs an integral palliative approach, regardless of whether or not he is able to recover.
In relation to pain control, continuing to provide treatment is in Charlie’s best interests. Finally, Cardinal Sgreccia denounces conceptualizing the efficient management of health resources which generates a rampant disposable culture—a cultural paradigm that tends to recognize the non-dignity of certain human beings because of the medical afflictions with which they must exist with. The dark irony is that those many of those who would defend the right to euthanasia in the name of human autonomy deny autonomy in decision making for those who wish to use extraordinary means to preserve their lives or the lives of those trusted to their care.
In this very real and tragic case, Charlie's family needs our prayers. We cannot praise enough these courageous parents who stand for the parent’s rights and the good of their loved one. In the modern war against the family, this is an important battle. These parents, as natural procreators and God-given defenders of their child, resist the appropriation of the life in the name of positive law and modern ideology. They merit our admiration, support and prayers.
The harrowing untold story of the priests in Dachau
by Francis Phillips
posted Thursday, 13 Jul 2017
2,579 priests, monks and seminarians from Germany and Occupied Europe were imprisoned at the camp
In my parish, we have the enormous privilege of being able to attend Mass almost every morning. Because it is so regular we often tend to forget what a privilege this is, and even take it for granted. Sometimes you have to be jolted out of your comfort zone to remember that Mass, the “source and summit of the Christian life”, is denied to millions of Catholics in other parts of the world. And if this is the case for a layperson like me, how much more so is it the case for an ordained priest.
I make these remarks as I have just been reading The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945 by a French journalist, Guillaume Zeller (Ignatius Press). He relates the story of Dachau, the first concentration camp to be built – in 1933, outside Munich – where, uniquely in the concentration camp system, there were three designated “priests’ barracks”: numbers 26, 28 and 30. In all, 2,579 priests, monks and seminarians from Germany and all over Occupied Europe were imprisoned there between 1938 and 1945. Of this number, 1,034 died there.
Not to be able to celebrate Mass was a huge deprivation for the imprisoned priests. As one of their number, Fr Bedrich Hoffmann, relates, “What it means for a priest to live without Mass and without Communion can only be understood by another priest.” On admission, they were divested of their cassocks, bibles, missals, holy medals and rosaries, stripped and shaved and given old clothes with a red triangle sewn on them – the sign for “political” detainees.
However, as the result of intense diplomatic pressure from the Vatican, the situation changed at the end of 1940, when a chapel was permitted to be set up in Block 26. The first Mass at Dachau was celebrated on 21 January 1941. The tabernacle had been made secretly in the carpenter’s workshop; the altar and candlesticks had been salvaged from camp materials; and parishioners who had managed to stay in touch with their imprisoned priests, sent vestments, prayer books, Stations of the Cross, holy pictures and two monstrances.
The SS officials who ran the camp naturally placed many restrictions on the liturgical services. Lay prisoners were forbidden to attend – though Communion was secretly distributed to Catholics in other barracks at the risk of severe punishments, and sometimes other prisoners secretly attended Mass or hovered near the chapel window in order hear as much of the liturgy as possible.
One of them, Joseph Rovan, wrote later in his recollections of Dachau: “The priest was saying the same Latin words that all his confreres, at the same hour, were repeating in their morning Masses throughout the world. No longer could I recall the world of the concentration camp. Each one, for a precious moment, was restored to his original, fragile and indestructible dignity…On the way out, in the pale light of the early morning, one felt capable of facing a little better the hunger and the fear.”
Another prison, Marcel Dejean, echoes this: “…We rediscovered the idea of Love in the midst of suffering, hunger, egoism, hatred or indifference and also a palpable sense of calm: the beauty of the altar…in the midst of our filth and poverty, tranquillity, recollection and solitude in the midst of constant overcrowding…The SS were no longer anything but a sad nothingness beside the splendid, immortal reality of Christ.”
I shall try to keep these memories in mind when I attend Mass tomorrow morning.
by Francis Phillips
posted Thursday, 13 Jul 2017
2,579 priests, monks and seminarians from Germany and Occupied Europe were imprisoned at the camp
In my parish, we have the enormous privilege of being able to attend Mass almost every morning. Because it is so regular we often tend to forget what a privilege this is, and even take it for granted. Sometimes you have to be jolted out of your comfort zone to remember that Mass, the “source and summit of the Christian life”, is denied to millions of Catholics in other parts of the world. And if this is the case for a layperson like me, how much more so is it the case for an ordained priest.
I make these remarks as I have just been reading The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945 by a French journalist, Guillaume Zeller (Ignatius Press). He relates the story of Dachau, the first concentration camp to be built – in 1933, outside Munich – where, uniquely in the concentration camp system, there were three designated “priests’ barracks”: numbers 26, 28 and 30. In all, 2,579 priests, monks and seminarians from Germany and all over Occupied Europe were imprisoned there between 1938 and 1945. Of this number, 1,034 died there.
Not to be able to celebrate Mass was a huge deprivation for the imprisoned priests. As one of their number, Fr Bedrich Hoffmann, relates, “What it means for a priest to live without Mass and without Communion can only be understood by another priest.” On admission, they were divested of their cassocks, bibles, missals, holy medals and rosaries, stripped and shaved and given old clothes with a red triangle sewn on them – the sign for “political” detainees.
However, as the result of intense diplomatic pressure from the Vatican, the situation changed at the end of 1940, when a chapel was permitted to be set up in Block 26. The first Mass at Dachau was celebrated on 21 January 1941. The tabernacle had been made secretly in the carpenter’s workshop; the altar and candlesticks had been salvaged from camp materials; and parishioners who had managed to stay in touch with their imprisoned priests, sent vestments, prayer books, Stations of the Cross, holy pictures and two monstrances.
The SS officials who ran the camp naturally placed many restrictions on the liturgical services. Lay prisoners were forbidden to attend – though Communion was secretly distributed to Catholics in other barracks at the risk of severe punishments, and sometimes other prisoners secretly attended Mass or hovered near the chapel window in order hear as much of the liturgy as possible.
One of them, Joseph Rovan, wrote later in his recollections of Dachau: “The priest was saying the same Latin words that all his confreres, at the same hour, were repeating in their morning Masses throughout the world. No longer could I recall the world of the concentration camp. Each one, for a precious moment, was restored to his original, fragile and indestructible dignity…On the way out, in the pale light of the early morning, one felt capable of facing a little better the hunger and the fear.”
Another prison, Marcel Dejean, echoes this: “…We rediscovered the idea of Love in the midst of suffering, hunger, egoism, hatred or indifference and also a palpable sense of calm: the beauty of the altar…in the midst of our filth and poverty, tranquillity, recollection and solitude in the midst of constant overcrowding…The SS were no longer anything but a sad nothingness beside the splendid, immortal reality of Christ.”
I shall try to keep these memories in mind when I attend Mass tomorrow morning.
The Paganization of New Testament Studies
February 1, 2003 by Dr. Peter Jones
INTRODUCTION
Given the institutions where I have taught during my professional life, it is appropriate to begin my overview of the Paganization/Gnosticization [2] of New Testament Studies with a quote from J. Gresham Machen, speaking of the inroads of Liberalism into the American church at the beginning of the last century:
“The truth is that liberalism has lost sight of the very centre and core of the Christian teaching. In the Christian view of God as set forth in the Bible, there are many elements. But one attribute of God is absolutely fundamental in the Bible; one attribute is absolutely necessary in order to render intelligible all the rest. That attribute is the awful transcendence of God. From beginning to end the Bible is concerned to set forth the awful gulf that separates the creature from the Creator. It is true, indeed, that according to the Bible God is immanent in the world. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him. But He is immanent in the world not because He is identified with the world, but because He is the free Creator and upholder of it. Between the creature and the Creator a great gulf is fixed.” [3]
To be sure, Machen does mention Gnosticism, but he does define the essence it religious belief. Gnosticism, which builds on the common pagan notion of humanity as divine. Plato taught that the soul “was immortal by its very nature.” [4] This notion is integrated into Jewish thinking by Philo, [5] and developed by later Gnosticism as the alien “divine spark” within humanity. [6] Hans Jonas defines Gnosticism as radically dualistic-a dualism between man and the world,” [7] an anthropological a-cosmism.” [8] “The essence of man is knowledge, of the self and God.” As the famous Messina Colloquium on Gnosticism in 1966 clearly recognized, “the idea of divine consubstantiality” is a defining notion of Gnosticism. [9] Such a notion effectively eliminates the uniqueness and transcendence of God.
The Gospel of Thomas appears to reflect this notion in its view of redemption, proposing a “‘backwards’ creation” for Mary, moving from the “female rib into the male Adam, and back into the ‘living spirit.'” [10] This is nothing less than the undoing of creation, expressed most powerfully in sexual/gender transformation and liberation. There is here proposed the destruction of the opposites and a return to primordial unity. [11] The cosmos is an ordered universe, but “an order with a vengeance, alien to man’s aspirations.” [12] Such a world view eventually finds the biblical notion of a transcendent Creator, distinct from the creation, creating an ordered cosmos, as insufferable foolishness; indeed, the epitome of evil, [13] and Jahweh is unceremoniously thrown into Hell. [14]
The essence of liberalism throughout its history is the importation into the church via the use of Christian terminology, of the various historic expressions of pagan notions, in particular, the denial of God’s transcendence. In this sense, the first “liberals” were the Gnostics. Certainly a form of Gnosticism, sometimes called proto-Gnosticism is behind the denial of the incarnation in the Johannine epistles, and of the resurrection in the early and later Paulines. Interestingly, the Liberals of the modern period have had great admiration for the proto-Gnostics, in particular, Marcion. In A.D. 150, Marcion, a theologian from Pontus in Asia Minor, was excommunicated from the Church in Rome for heretical teaching. He dismissed God the Creator, the Old Testament, the Mosaic Law, and three of the gospels. From the few epistles of Paul that he accepted, he expunged Old Testament quotations and claimed to worship the “alien god” behind the God of Scripture. [15] Tertullian (AD 160‑225) called Marcion “the Pontic mouse who has nibbled away the Gospels . . . abolished marriage,” and . . . tore God almighty to bits with [his] blasphemies,” [16] and Polycarp (A.D. 69‑155), who knew the apostle John, called Marcion “the first‑born of Satan.” [17]
In spite of Marcion’s massive rejection of early Christian orthodoxy, and his denunciation and excommunication by the second century Church, the great nineteenth century Liberal historian and theologian, Adolf von Harnack, called Marcion “the first Protestant.” For Harnack, “Protestant” meant “liberal.” The similarly sympathetic judgment by Helmut Koester, a Bultmannian New Testament scholar, lately at Harvard, calls Marcion “a textual critic, philologian and reformer.” [18] When these church fathers are dismissed by contemporary liberal scholars as “myopic heresy hunters,” [19] and the terms “Protestant” and “reformer” are associated with the Gnostic Marcion, making him a virtual second-century Martin Luther, we must see that we are in the presence of a “palace revolution.” The popularity of Marcion can only be understood in the light of the present-day Gnosticization of Biblical Studies. Liberal Lutheran Koester is disarmingly clear. He urges scholars to abandon the New Testament canon in order to allow the other early Christian voices–“heretics, Marcionites, Gnosticism, Jewish Christians, perhaps also women—. . . to be heard again.” [20] The contemporary promotion of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts as a valid expression of early Christianity is a further example of liberalism’s predilection for Gnosticism. This is in no sense a “reformation”: it is rather a profound revisionism of Christian history leading to a major theological revolution, namely, the normalization of heretical Gnosticism in contemporary mainline Christianity.
As at the time of Gnosticism, today the great biblical doctrine under attack like no other is the doctrine of God the transcendent Creator. In this sense, Gnosticism has returned to the Church with a vengeance.
RUDOLF BULTMANN
The role of Gnosticism in the paganization of Biblical Studies was initially the result of the work of one man, Rudolf Bultmann. One cannot underestimate the importance and influence of Bultmann. Schmithals, An Introduction to the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (1967), 1: “…no living theologian’s work is noted and discussed more than that of RB. B is for our time what Karl Barth was to the German speaking world between the two world wars. The main difference is that B’s theology has aroused lively interest transcending all boundaries of churches, languages and indeed religions…” “…one of the theological giants of the twentieth century.” David Ferguson, Bultmann (1992), viii. Of very few is it said: his work is “a towering achievement.” James Robinson says, “The new quest…the later Heidegger, hermeneutic and Gnosticism find in Bultmann their unity.” [21]
Bultmann believed a great deal of the NT, especially John and Paul, had profound relationships with Gnosticism. [22] TNT I, 165: “Whereas to ancient man the world had become home-in the OT as God’s creation, to classic Greece as the cosmos pervaded by the deity-the utter difference of human existence from all worldly existence was recognized for the first time in Gnosticism and Christianity, and thus the world became foreign soil to the human self.”
He claimed that “the cosmological dualism of Gnosticism has become in John a dualism of decision.”(TNT II, 21). Though he only had knowledge of pre-Nag Hammadi Gnosticism, and wrongly believed that the Gnostic redeemer myth is at the base of Christology, which has never been established, [23] he did understand the Gnostic impulse.
Bultmann’s fascination with Gnosticism doubtless arose from the connection he saw between it and 20th century existentialism which was Bultmann’s fundamental inspiration for understanding the NT. James Robinson makes the same connection, characterizing the ancient Gnostics as the “dropouts” of Roman imperial society, comparing them to the “counter‑culture movements coming from the 60’s.” [24] Rudolf calls their interpretations of Scripture as “protest exegesis,” [25] and Hans Jonas draws fascinating parallels between ancient Gnosticism and modern exxistentialism. Heidegger’s view of God, according to Jonas, approximates to that of the Gnostics, who is the “other, the unknown.” [26] This God, says Jonas, is “a nihilistic conception: no nomos emanates from him, no law for nature and thus none for human action…” [27] In Gnosticism, the true pneumatic is radically free from psychical essence; in existentialism no “determinative essence is permitted to prejudice the freely self-projecting existence.” [28] Jonas notes that Heidegger’s description of Dasein as “having being thrown”-Geworfenheit, is originally a Gnostic notion, because in the Mandean literature it is “a standing phrase: life has been thrown into the world…the soul into the body.” [29]
Bultmann made existentialism his heuristic principle for unlocking the code of the NT message. George Eldon Ladd, Bultmann (Chicago: Inter-Varsity Press, 1964), 30: “The heart of Bultmann’s positive message [is] the interpretation of the gospel in terms of authentic [eschatological]existence.” Indeed, Heidegger and Bultmann did joint seminars together at Marburg, and to Heidegger Bultmann dedicated Faith and Understanding, the first volume of his collected essays, in 1933. [Tillich was another colleague at Marburg during that period].
…the work of existential philosophy, which I came to know through my discussion with Martin Heidegger, has become of decisive significance for me. I found in it the conceptuality in which it is possible to speak adequately of human existence and therefore also of the existence of the believer. [30]
Without this philosophy, “it is a mistake to think we can understand a word of the New Testament”; without it, the Scripture will have nothing to say to the present.” [31]
Bultmann believed that Heidegger’s existentialist analysis of the structure of being “is nothing more than a secularized, philosophical version of the New Testament’s view of human existence.” The difference is that Jesus makes authenticity happen, by faith. [32]: Bultmann said about Heidegger: “I learned from him not what theology has to say but how it has to say it.” Or again, “…we all not necessarily subscribe to Heidegger’s philosophical theories when we learn something from his existential analysis.” [33]
Taking Heidegger’s analysis as the grid of interpretation, “revelation” is not God’s self-disclosure. It must be understood in existential terms…[about me and my future, not revelation about God or cosmology or the future of the world]. Theology must arise out of anthropology.[34] As Bultmann says, “Paul’s theology is, at the same time, anthropology.” [35] According to Schmithals, Heidegger asks the question of being in a new way, not in terms of the cosmos, but in an analysis of human existence. Human existence, according to Heidegger means that man [in the words of Schmithals] “always has himself before himself as his own possibility; to exist in an authentic way means to keep oneself open at all times for…the future.” [36] If man is his own possibility, authentic existence means to keep oneself open for the future. According to Heidegger, “Dasein has Always fallen away from itself and into the world…It goes over to the world. It allows itself to be determined…by the world…which is nothingness. All this happens on the basis of an anxiety in which the insignificance of my Dasein and the nothingness of the world dawn upon me.” [37]
Bultmann boldly affirms that the observer has no objective place on which to stand from which to observe reality.[38] He thus anticipates the postmodern critique of modernity. Bultmann nevertheless observes existence-with the aid of existentialism, which gives “the ontological structure of being.” [39] In other words, he does claim to make statements about existence, but inevitably from within a world view and its presuppositions about existence. [40] Bultmann calls this “pre-understanding.” It is an appropriate or “right philosophy.” [41] He calls this “a scientific-religious understanding of the ontological and abstract features of the understanding of existence which lie behind the particular beliefs of the [New Testament] writers.” [42] “…real meaning yielded by existential analysis is for Bultmann the meaning of Scripture as the word of God.” [43] In other words, existential analysis is the word of God. This makes what is believed to be inherent within nature the determining truth about existence. This is surely a fundamentally pagan concept of knowledge and truth, which eliminates the transcended Lord and Creator and special revelation. G. Kuhlmann argues that Bultmann’s dependence on Heidegger means that he only ever describes the “natural” man. [44] Bultmann argues that Christian theology gives the “how”: philosophy only describes the “that.” Bultmann states that Heidegger’s philosophy was “atheistic” in the sense that God is not the subject of the philosophy of the early Heidegger, thus leaving room for theology. [45]
THE EARLY HEIDEGGER
Heidegger was certainly one of the great philosophers of the modern age, certainly, but two things catch my attention: 1. his moral failings, and, 2. his religious commitments, which perhaps get to the heart of the man and his thought.
Heidegger’s major moral failings included his commitment to Nazism, which he never ever repudiated, and the decades-long affair he had with his major apologist in the English-speaking world and former student, Hannah Arendt. Edward Oakes believes these were not blind spots but failures that flowed directly from his philosophy. [46]
Heidegger’s religious commitments trace the course of his life. He began “as an ultraconservative Catholic, destined for the priesthood, [47] after 1917 bec[a]me deeply involved in a dailogue with liberal Protestant historical theology. After 1928 Heidegger deeply antagonistic to, even an aggressive opponent of, Christianity.” [48] In 1928 he also became an enthusiastic reader of Nietzsche, where the myth of Being is purged of any Jewish or Christian notions, and his philosophy became Judenrein. [49]
His rejection of Catholicism included his denial of metaphysics, that is, in essence, the biblical account of existence, which includes the transcendent God of Creation. In the name of human existence, Heidegger denies the biblical doctrine of God and creation. For him there is no such thing as “human nature” nor purpose to human existence save the freedom of “self-actualization.” This notion fundamentally undermined any concept of objective morality. [50] These two notions, self-actualization and the lack of objective morality doubtless explain his interest in National Socialism. [51]
Grounding Dasein in freedom “as the inner source of its possibility,” against traditional metaphysics, certainly accords with a Gnostic view of existence. [52] In Gnosticism, freedom is likewise gained via the elimination of the transcendent God of Scripture. Heidegger does not ground the reality of Dasein in God but in its own structure, in nothing outside of itself. This is its the ultimate transcendence. [53] It cannot transcend to something outside itself. There is nothing out there.
Realizing the failure of traditional metaphysics thus brings one to the fact of nothing outside of being, so that the arrival at nothing unveils being. [54] In this account of existence there are shades of Buddhism, as a number of scholars have pointed out. [55] Heidegger seeks to root objective thought “in something more primal than a metaphysically understood subject.” [56] In other contemporary words of Harold Bloom, who, on becoming a modern Gnostic, declared: “I am as old as God.” According to Heidegger, metaphysics “is Dasein’s effort to ground itself…in some supreme being, itself an uncaused cause.” [57] This is an objectifying kind of thought in which the subject establishes itself as the basis of reality…reality becomes merely the subject’s picture.” [58] Metaphysics has no existence.
This understanding of being that is the result of overcoming metaphysics is called “non-conceptual thought….A return to the soil out of which metaphysics grew.” [59] In Heidegger’s What Is Metaphysics, he clarifies the metaphysics implicit in his earlier existentialist analysis. [60] It is not a simple, objective description of human existence in the world. It is human existence devoid of classic metaphysics. When asked if he had changed, Heidegger said truth was the way, not any particular moment on the way. [61]
Just how pagan is existentialism? What is the inner principle of that world view contained in existential philosophy? Is it Christian or pagan?
It is often claimed that it was only the early Heidegger who influenced Bultmann. [62] It is often argued that it was Heidegger’s Being and Time that influenced Bultmann, which came from the period prior to his anti-Christian, pro-Greek polemic-it was a demythologized, existentialist map of existence that Christian theologians believed they could use. [63]
However, Bultmann, himself, did not consider the later Heidegger’s thought as a conversion, “but sees the ‘late’ Heidegger in unbroken continuity with the ‘early’ Heidegger.” [64] Indeed, Heidegger claimed that his work on existentialist analysis was not “for its own sake, but rather in order to awaken new questions as to the meaning of being.” [65] [against Bultmann’s claim to merely using description]. How does this affect Bultmann’s “Christian” theology?
BULTMANN’S VIEW OF GOD
Bultmann’s approach to the NT is uniquely through human experience. That which does not fit the existentialist grid is demythologized. In other words, like Heidegger, he rejects classic Christian metaphysics. If we may call a spade a spade, Bultmann rejects the biblical worldview of God the transcendent Lord, Creator of heaven and earth, and thus stands in some real sense, within so-called “Christian” Gnosticism. Little wonder Bultmann can claim that the difference between the dualisms of Gnosticism and Christianity is that in Gnosticism it is the dualism between the evil created world and the divine soul; in Christianity, it has become “a dualism of decision,” “the decision against the world for God.” [66] Is this finally merely a difference of terminology, thus a distinction without a difference? Otherwise, how could Bultmann compare identification with Christ’s death as analogous to the death of the divinity in the mystery religions (TNT, I, 297), [67] and claim that “the Gnostic view of redemption offered the apostle an equally appropriate form of expression.” [68]
In Faith and Understanding (45), Bultmann denies that God is a being. He talks of God as “Creator” of man, but “not in the sense of a cosmological theory which professes to explain the origin of the world. Rather it is a proposition that concerns man’s existence.” [69] Though Bultmann, in Faith and Understanding (263), argued that liberalism had read the NT through the lens of a “pantheism of history,” where religious meaning is implicit in historical events. Bultmann, it seems, has opted for a “pantheism of existence.” Ridderbos says it well: “Bultmann’s conception is a grandiose attempt to effect a synthesis between the Christian faith and immanence philosophy (the view of life which seeks to find the absolute within the limits or boundaries of the human spirit), here conceived of in its existential form.” [70]
Ridderbos argues that insofar as this affirmation of man as spirit is within man’s own reach, God is entirely superfluous, but he claims that Bultmann is different from existentialism because man is brought to decision through the address of God’s word, thereby “join[ing] the Christian faith to existentialism.” [71] But if Roberts is right, only existentialism is God’s word.
After three hundred and twenty two pages of profound analysis, hailed by Paul Homer, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School as “the most penetrating study of Bultmann that I have read,” Robert Roberts, professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Western Kentucky University. summarizes the whole project of Bultmann as an attempt to reduce the content of Christian theology to a single idea: that of an act or decision in which man draws his self-understanding and thus his self into conformity with his authentic being as potentiality to be. [72] Though aesthetically pleasing, Roberts calls this tour de force “a disaster” for failing to do justice to the Christian faith and thus failing to aid people in their relationship with God. [73] I agree with the judgment of Ladd, who observes: “…Bultmann’s existential interpretation is the contemporary adaptation of the gospel to the prevailing philosophy [of the day],” [74] which, in this case, I would add, was a subtle form of paganism, delivered in the new, beguiling clothes of existentialism.
BULTMANN’S DISCIPLES
Bultmann did his deconstructive work, ridding the Christian faith of genuine transcendence, but James Robinson suggested in an SBL “fireside chat,” that Bultmann did not go far enough. “I would have liked to get involved in the death-of-God controversy…,[I]n demythologizing, Bultmann did not carry through consistently with regard to God talk.” [75]
Robert Funk, in a public lecture at the SBL Meeting in New Orleans, November, 1996, entitled “The Incredible Creed,” argued that Bultmann had not gone far enough, but had hastened the demise of the kerygma because already he did not believe in heaven and hell, good and evil spirits, miracles, eschatology as an event produced by God, divine determination, death as the punishment for sin, the atonement and the resurrection. But Bultmann’s radical stance was attenuated by working within the neo-orthodox confines of the kerygma and the Christ event.
Following Bultmann and Heidegger, Funk states: “The God of the metaphysical age is dead. There is not a personal god out there external to human beings…” Funk, Weststar website. Here you have the model for a consistent carrying through of the demythologization of biblical God talk, which owes much to the Later Heidegger.
NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES AND THE LATER HEIDEGGER
James Robinson wrote in and edited a book in 1963 entitled The Later Heidegger and Theology, [76] in which Robinson can hardly curb his wild enthusiasm for future theologizing. He speaks of the “explosive potentialities of the ‘later Heidegger’ for theology.” [77] Certainly a new wave of Protestant theologians saw in the later Heidegger new possibilities for theology. [78]
These post-Bultmannians went beyond Bultmann, just as Heidegger did. Where Bultmann tried to eliminate the mythic overlay of heavenly messengers and angelic powers, in a sort of closed-system rationalism, the later Heidegger sought to re-instate them. [79] Heidegger demythologizies the Bible and remythologizes the world in the accents of a Greek neomythology. [80] So Heidegger and the later Bultmannians went beyond Bultmann into religious pagan mysticism.
THE LATER HEIDEGGER
Generally, for Heidegger, one can speak of “a shift away from a biblical religion to a certain Greek religion….Heidegger now invokes not no god but new gods…” [81] Heidegger never gave up his commitment to Greek mythology. Heidegger was fascinated by Greece and spoke as much about “the gods” as about “God.” He speaks of “‘the gods [who] are the beckoning messengers of the Godhead,’ in himself incomparable and ineffable.” [82]
“Indeed, the later writings invoke a certain pagan mythic world of mundane gods and divinized cosmic powers.” [83]
After the war, the so-called later Heidegger becomes more mystical and meditative, and returns to Meister Eckhart, who had fascinated him earlier in his life. [84]
In this “religious” phase, he spoke of the possibility of a “coming destiny of Being, of a New Age, a coming Dawn, an Other Beginning, a new dispensation of Being and the Holy in which the last god will…make a new manifestation of the Holy possible.” [85] In 1959 Heidegger said that in his thinking “the door remains open for a non-metaphysical God…” [86]
Barth argued that theology gives priority to God over man, and that Heidegger gave priority to Dasein over being, but, according to Robinson, the later Heidegger gave priority to being. [87] But this is the typical confusion where faith of all kind is ok., where the very nature of being determines everything. It is reflected in John Macquarrie’s judgment: “a holy or sacred reality at the heart of all being [is that which] is central to [Eastern and Western] religion,” not a specific definition of God. [88] In this deep sense, argues Macquarrie, Heidegger is religious.” [This is also the position of Tillich, the third of the triumvirate at Marburg].
John D. Caputo, has a chapter, “Heidegger’s Gods.” Here is his fascinating thesis:
“In the 20s Heidegger took the jewgreek world of biblical Christianity seriously and moved in a demythologizing, ontologizing direction. From the 30s on, Jews and Greeks were shown the door and replaced by a pantheon of “pagan” “gods,” pure Greeks, and celebrated in an openly mythologizing thinking, which culminated in the hope that one day one of them would come along and save us.” [89] “The myth of Being, of Hellas and Germania, was made possible by the exclusion of Semitic myth-not only the myths of creation, fall and redemption, but above all by the myth of justice…and compassion.” [90]
At the same time, Heidegger was deeply religious. He is reputed to have said quite often, noch nur ein Gott kann uns retten-“Only a God can save us.” [91] What kind of God would that be? He agreed with Nietzsche that the God of classical biblical orthodoxy was dead. [92] He said he was neither “an atheist or a theist.” [93] Thus it can be argued, as Casuto does, that “Heidegger’s later writings are more suggestive of a certain Buddhism…than of Judaism and Christianity and the emancipatory power of biblical justice.” [94]
THE DECONSTRUCTION OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES
A powerful wing of Biblical Studies has been committed to the promotion of this Later Heideggerian pagan spirituality, particularly via the rehabilitation of ancient Gnosticism as a valid form of early Christianity. Robinson states that Bultmann’s pupils agree that theology must work with the later Heidegger. [95] Robinson and Koester apply the deconstructive program of their mentor, Rudolf Bultmann, the “demythologization of the New Testament.” Thereby dismantling the theistic understanding of the New Testament. Constructively they propose to fill the void the spirituality of monistic Gnosticism. Despite the vast cultural differences between North American Protestantism and ancient Gnosticism,” says Philip Lee, noted author on this subject, “the parallels between the two . . . can no longer be ignored.” [96] Lee could see that the interest in Gnosticism was not purely historical. As Robinson says about the Nag Hammadi texts: “The focus of this library has much in common with primitive Christianity, with eastern religions, and with holy men of all times, as well as with the more secular equivalents of today, such as the counter-culture movements coming from the 1960’s.” [97]
Why would Bultman’s disciples be so interested in Gnosticism? In 1985, as president of the prestigious Society of Biblical Literature, James M. Robinson issued a programmatic statement for the twenty‑first century. He called upon his fellow Bible scholars to deconstruct their discipline in order to “lay bare [its] . . . biblicistic presuppositions.” The Bible would no longer serve as the ultimate source of authority and as the definition of true Christianity. [98] We were warned. Ever since, Robinson’s agenda has picked up momentum not only because the time was right and his message fitted the mood of the modern world, but also because James M. Robinson and his colleague Helmut Koester of Harvard Divinity School have done seminal work to bring it about. [99] As a measure of Robinson’s importance, Robert Funk of the Jesus Seminar calls him “the Secretary of State of the biblical guild . . . (an) academic counterpart . . . (to) Henry Kissenger.” [100] Both Koester and Robinson are past presidents of the Society of Biblical Literature. Both have been committed to a clearly defined program: “The Dismantling and Reassembling of the Categories of New Testament Scholarship,” as one of Robinson’s articles is entitled. [101] One category they have successfully dismantled is heresy and orthodoxy. [102]
Both separately and together, Koester and Robinson sought to uncover the radical pluralism in the earliest church, causing Christian theology to develop along various trajectories. Orthodoxy was one trajectory, but not the only deposit of the true gospel, making the others heretical. [103] Koester contests that there is not “one gospel” as Paul said, but at least “four.” [104]
James Robinson put content to his manifesto. He founded and is director of the Institute For Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont, California. It is devoted to the rehabilitation of texts and a theology that the early Church denounced as heresy. Within this organization Robinson launched the Coptic Gnostic Library Project, which translates, publishes, and promotes the Gnostic texts. A great service to the scholarly world, it is also a powerful tool for the neo‑Gnostic theological revival. “Secretary of state” is not an exaggeration. Robinson has been the leading force behind the “Q Seminar” (whose importance for the new understanding of Jesus we shall discuss below); an active member of the Jesus Seminar (founded by a colleague, Robert Funk); and director of the Coptic Magical Texts Project, which promotes heretical Gnostic and magic Christianity.
Robinson describes the Church fathers who opposed Gnosticism as “myopic heresy hunters.” The future lies with inclusion. Gnosticism (heresy) and orthodoxy are two trajectories of early Christianity. What was a marginal position just a generation ago is now touted as majority conviction. Robinson encourages modern theology to extract values from both trajectories in order to produce a new formulation of Christianity for today. [105]Robinson’s 1985 manifesto explodes the constraining limits of the orthodox biblical canon. Koester readily admits that this is not value free, objective science. The old liberal historical‑critical method was, he grants, “designed as a hermeneutical tool for the liberation from conservative prejudice and from the power of ecclesiastical and political institutions.” [106] In the same way, future New Testament studies should have as their goal “political and religious renewal… inspired by the search for equality, freedom and justice” in the “comprehensive political perspective” of our modern world. [107]
In November, 1995 at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, victory was declared. Leading New Testament scholars rejoiced that the heretical Gnostic Gospel of Thomas had finally made it into the club, and that now we could disband the club. By club they meant the New Testament canon of Holy Scripture. They were referring to the elevation of Thomas alongside the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These backsliders from Christianity seem to be succeeding where their ancient spiritual cousins failed. In a second century list of New Testament books to be received as canonical, it is stated that the books of the heretical Gnostics have no place in the Bible because one cannot mix “gall with honey.” [108] James Robinson declared the elevation of the noxious Thomas into the life-giving Gospels as “the coming of age of American New Testament scholarship.”
Christianity has been Americanized by infusing Gnosticism into the message of the Bible. In a parallel universe, scholars now speak of the Americanization of Buddhism. “It is something of an article of faith in US Buddhist circles that Americans are improving the traditions-by making [Buddhism] more democratic, more practical, more socially engaged, more [feminized].” [109] The same goals mark this new Bible study. But there is also an aspect of triangulation here, since Marcus Borg’s new vision of Jesus compares him to the Buddha. [110]
Helmut Koester, in the epilogue of a collection of essays in his honor,21 gives his own prospective for future directions of the New Testament field. Early Christianity, he says, is just one of several Hellenistic propaganda religions, competing with others who seriously believed in their god and who also imposed moral standards on their followers. [111]
Only contradictory understandings of the Christian faith can explain the divergent evaluations of Gnosticism we noted above. Orthodox Christianity has always maintained the antithesis separating all expressions of paganism, including “Christian” paganism, from biblical truth. Liberalism has always tried to muddy the waters. Today liberals are claiming that ancient Gnosticism is an alternate, authentic expression of early Christianity. Is this estimation plausible? The early Church fathers said no. Modern liberalism says yes.
What would a modern Gnostic, with no pretensions to Christianity either orthodox or liberal, say? Duncan Greenlees is just such a Gnostic, an adept of the theosophical/occult tradition. His evaluation of Gnosticism is therefore most interesting:
Gnosticism is a system of direct experiential knowledge of God . . . the Soul and the universe; therefore it has no fixed dogmas or creed. . . . In the early centuries of this era, amid a growing Christianity, it took on the form of the Christian faith, while rejecting most of its specific beliefs. Its wording is therefore largely Christian, while its spirit is that of the latest paganism of the West . . . [emphasis mine] [112]
Here is no claim that Gnosticism is a valid though alternate form of Christianity. On this issue modern Gnostics and ancient church fathers agree. Both affirm that Christianity and Gnosticism are different religions, even if they sometimes use common terminology. One religion is pagan humanism, the other divinely revealed truth.
The program of the insertion of pagan religion into Christianity nevertheless is carried through in recent academic publications in order to deliver the real Jesus, the original Christian community and a radical redefinition of the Christian faith.
This has produced what Tom Wright calls:
THE GNOSTIC JESUS
The Gnostic Jesus [113] comes in a number of forms, many directly from the Jesus Seminar: peasant cynic, Jewish teacher, social revolution, apocalyptic prophet, the first feminist, mystical guru. Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar gives us his take on Jesus. His goal is to liberate Jesus “from the scriptural and creedal and experiential prisons in which we have incarcerated him.” This new Jesus is a teacher rather than a divine being, emphasizing forgiveness and freedom over punishment and piety, endorsing “protected recreational sex among consenting adults.” [114]
The approach of Marcus Borg, another fellow of the Seminar is an interesting case study in the nature of this new Gnosticizing quest. In his writings, Borg begins by noting a “major shift,” what he calls “the lessening interest in eschatology and apocalyptic.” This, you remember, was what Schweitzer noted about the liberal 19th century Jesuses. Borg is a man with a mission. He believes his “charismatic” Jesus “radically challenges the flattened sense of reality pervading the modern world view, and much of the mainline church,” in other words, a purely this worldly, social reformer, the result of previous NT critical work!
Borg hails the emergence of new questions-the questions are less specifically Christian, and more global, comparing Jesus to other religious figures; as well as new methods-since past methods were narrowly historical-the new are based on insights from the history of religions, cultural anthropology and the social sciences. [115]
Here is scholarship preparing the bed it intends to lie in, perhaps without even realizing that this is what is going on. For Borg then goes on to underline a new consensus. It is a consensus merely reflecting the limited number of groups that employ them.
A NEW CANON/NO CANON
“The distinctions between canonical and non-canonical, orthodox and heretical are obsolete…One can only speak of a ‘History of Early Christian Literature.'” [116] This again is an example, not of objective history but of theological prejudice that rejects the very notion of canon from the outset. Thus the pluralism and syncretism of today is read into the history of the Early Church.
The essential strategy is to incorporate ancient Gnosticism as a valid expression of early Christianity, and since Nag Hammadi Gnosticism is ascetic, for the general Christian public it is much more palatable form to rehabilitate. This is especially the case of the Gospel of Thomas, considered by left-wing scholarship as close to Q and earlier and more authentic than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Hence the massive attempt to elevate Thomas to Christian canonical status, for once Thomas is “in” the very notion of a theologically coherent canon is forever undermined. [117]
This scholarship grants the gift of existence to a purely hypothetical document Q, as a number of recent titles indicate–The First Gospel, [118] The Lost Gospel [119], and Q Thomas Reader, (hailed on the back cover as “The Earliest Sayings Gospels,”) [120] – as well as to the “Christian” community in which Q was born. On these hypothetical creations hangs a radical interpretation of Jesus as a pagan guru. So much hangs on speculation.
Wenham’s judgment in 1992 is that the Q hypothesis, since “no one knows for certain whether a Q-document ever existed,” is still held as a working hypothesis “but with decreasing confidence.” [121] James Robinson, in the same lecture in which he claims that Q is the most important Christian text we have, admits to the ongoing debate about the Synoptic Problem. [122] William Farmer takes him to task:
“…contra Robinson, would it not be more reasonable to conclude that if the ongoing debate about the Synoptic Problem raises questions about whether “Q” ever existed, which it certainly is doing, should not theologians like Robinson acknowledge the hypothetical character of their reconstruction, and admit that their projects depend upon a premise that may be false, a premise which an increasing number of competent scholars are prepared to say probably is false.” [123]
Already in 1955 A. M. Farrer argued there was no need for Q if Luke used Matthew. Everything that was common was the result of Luke incorporating Matthew into his gospel. [124] The simplicity of this argument has convinced more than one contemporary scholar, [125] one of whom described Farrer’s article as a “firecracker.” [126] Farrer’s argument still sparkles, awaiting a satisfactory refutation. [127]Without Q, the whole reconstruction falls to the ground like a house of cards.
NEW SCRIPTURES/NO SCRIPTURES
Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, recently set up The Weststar Institute, producing a bi‑monthly journal, The Fourth R, and housing Polebridge Press. Polebridge Press has published The Complete Gospels (1992), edited by Robert J. Miller.43 This volume began as a new translation of the Bible, known as the Scholars Version. But since the translators attempted to avoid any overlay of orthodox theology, they refused the limitations of the orthodox canon as well. The implicit message of the title is that the canonical gospels are incomplete, and those who do not think so are biblically illiterate. The canonical gospels are “completed” by apocryphal gospels such as the Infancy Gospel of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, (a text long dismissed by critical scholars as popular folk literature of little theological interest). Also included in this complete canon are number of Gnostic gospels: The Gospel of Thomas, The Apocryphon of James, The Dialogue of the Savior, and The Gospel of Mary, all of which, Miller admits, witness to the blending of Christianity and Gnosticism.
All this is proposed in the name of objective science. Says one of the spokesmen for the Jesus Seminar: “[our work] is not answerable to any church….Our purpose is simply to let the gospels speak, as much as possible, on their own terms…” [128] The only problem with the image is that it is false. There is as much theological commitment here as in any openly religious group. [129] Moreover, the “science” on which the image is based leaves a lot to be desired.
If the science is not convincing, what ideology propels the movement? Notably, it is the “Christian” pagan syncretists who exult at the publication of The Five Gospels. The radical Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, who denies the virgin birth and accepts ordained homosexuals, hails the book as “a probing, penetrating, and deeply spiritual journey into the hearts of the gospels . . . and might well become the means whereby the secularized post‑Christian world discovers its own deepest roots.”79
Feminist rhetoric also avails itself of this new scholarship. Notably absent in the “Jesus seminar” at the RE‑Imagining Conference in 1993, attended by some five hundred participants, was the orthodox, New Testament image of Jesus. The proceedings began with songs to the goddess Sophia, and presenter Dolores S. Williams, a “womanist” theology professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City stated bluntly: “I do not think we need a theory of the atonement at all.” A leader of the seminar, Kwok Pui‑Lan, asked: “Who is this funny God that would sacrifice a lamb?” She went on to explain, in terms that recalled the Gospel of Thomas, that the Chinese do not believe in a God outside the creation, and that the Confucianist tradition emphasized the propensity for good in mankind.84
As we await the new Bible, various mainstream publishers have already entered the market. Harper San Francisco announces the arrival of The World’s Wisdom: Sacred Texts of the World’s Religion, by Philip Novak [1994]. “Virtually a World Bible for an age of intercultural understanding,” says the publisher, the book “presents the world’s most enlightening wisdom.” [130] 92 Penguin Books brings us The Portable World Bible [ed. Robert O. Batlou, 1994] which includes selections from the bibles of the major world religions: the Upanishads and the Bhagavad‑Gita of Hinduism, the Lotus of the True Law and The Tibetan Doctrine from Buddhism, The Gatas from Zoroastrianism, the Koran from Islam, the Li Ki and the Book of Filial Piety from Confucianism, the Tao‑Te King from Taoism, and “substantial selections from the Old and New Testaments” from Judaism and Christianity.
The World Scriptures, a gender and religion inclusive interfaith planetary Bible is part of the brave new world of the Age of Aquarius awaiting us in the third millennium.
APOSTATE SCHOLARS WITH A RELIGIOUS AGENDA
Above we mentioned the claim to objectivity. It is true that the Jesus Seminar prides itself on its objectivity. In the introduction to The Five Gospels Funk argues that, in the aftermath of the Scopes Trial (1925), American biblical scholarship retreated into the closet while the “fundamentalist mentality generated a climate of inquisition that made scholarly judgments dangerous.” [131] “The Christ of the creeds and dogma…can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope.” [132] But thanks to the Enlightenment and the dawn of the Age of Reason, biblical scholarship has nevertheless pioneered in its research to discover the real Jesus behind the “Christian facade of the Christ.” In taking the findings of the Seminar to the public, Funk states: “The public is poorly informed of the assured results of critical scholarship.” [133] He gives a definition of “critical”: “The Fellows of the Seminar are critical scholars. To be a critical scholar means to make empirical, factual evidence…the controlling factor in historical judgments. Non-critical scholars are those who put dogmatic considerations first and insist that factual evidence confirm theological premises.”
Faith in reason is nevertheless qualified. Funk claims that the JESUS Seminar had constantly before it the reminder: “beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.” [134]
Are not all these scholars coldly objective scientists giving us a Jesus liberated from church dogma and irrational faith? Not every member of The Jesus Seminar is an evangelical believer. Indeed, for “objectivity” there are even non-Christian fellows. But a number of the leaders are apostates from Christian orthodoxy.
JAMES M. ROBINSON
Robinson, a fellow of The Jesus Seminar was raised on the Westminster Confession of Faith by his father, the highly respected southern Presbyterian theologian William C. Robinson. “We were soaked in family prayers, bible reading and the recitation of the psalms…I have moved steadily left ever since.” [135] He was an evangelical minister in the old PCUS. Retired Presbyterian Church, US missionary to Brazil, Frederic R. Dinkins tells of his providential meeting with James Robinson in 1946 at a youth camp which turned Dinkins’ life around:
Jim Robinson had just finished Columbia Seminary and was working at the First Church in Hattiesburg…with a very conservative and evangelical pastor, Dr. McIntosh. Late one afternoon, at the Youth Camp, Jim Robinson spent about four hours with me – taking me through the Bible to show me some basic positive Reformed doctrine based on the Scriptures as God’s Word. He taught me and challenged me that I needed to study God’s Word if I was to be a minister….He taught me to rely on God’s Word. [136]
Soon after this encounter Dinkins went to Brazil where he worked for thirty five years. Robinson went to Germany to study under Bultmann. During his successful academic career Robinson has been committed to application and extension of Bultmann’s teaching. [137] From that deeply orthodox beginning, Robinson states, “I have moved steadily to the left ever since.” [138] James Robinson, general editor of The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), and director of the Institute For Antiquity and Christianity and the Coptic Gnostic Library Project excoriates the Church Fathers on whom we have depended for our knowledge of gnosticism until this point. Eight times in the scholarly introduction to this quasi-official English translation, Robinson uses the term “heretic” as in the phrase: “[The Gnostic view of existence] has until now been known almost exclusively through the myopic view of heresy hunters.” [139] This is unusually emotive language in such a scholarly work. Is it science or a desirable, new view of Christianity that drives this scholarship?
MARCUS BORG
Marcus Borg, another fellow of The Jesus Seminar and author of the recent book on Jesus, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time [140] is a deeply religious man. Raised an evangelical Lutheran, he now has discovered a new view of the Spirit and of Jesus. The Jesus he met again for the first time is not the Jesus of scriptural orthodoxy. Says New Testament scholar Borg, “Like Socrates, Jesus was a teacher of a subversive wisdom. Like the Buddha, he had an Enlightenment experience. Like a shaman, he was a healer. Like Gandhi, he protested against a purity system.” [141] Borg is not merely comparing Jesus with elements in the lives of other holy men. Borg is recognizing the validity of other religious traditions. For Borg’s new view of the Spirit, according to a recent study of Borg’s development, is actually “rooted in the pantheism of Huston Smith.” [142] So we need to ask not merely who is Jesus. We need to ask who is Huston Smith.
Huston Smith, born of missionary parents in China, is a well-known expert in comparative religions, deeply committed to monistic spirituality. Significantly associated with New Age and occult Theosophical thinkers, Smith is a sponsor of the Temple of Understanding, a organism of the Theosophical Society devoted to global syncretism which now has the privileged status of a Non-Governmental Organization in the United Nations. Smith was a faculty member with well-known New Ager and Assistant Secretary-General of the U.N., Robert Mueller, the Dalai Lama and Marilyn Ferguson, author of the book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, at an interfaith gathering in Malta in 1985, and in the same year gave a lecture at the Theosophical Society’s “Blavatsky Lodge” in Sydney, Australia on the subject, “Is a New World Religion Coming? [143] Huston Smith believes that there is, by the work of the “spirit” “an invisible geometry…working to shape (the great religious traditions of the world) into a single truth.”
Needless to say, this syncretistic view of the Spirit when employed by Marcus Borg will only consider believable a Jesus-guru who can blend into other religious systems. It will reject as unacceptable and thus unauthentic the exclusive claims of the Jesus of orthodox confession. In his personal testimony Borg states quite honestly: “I do not believe that Christianity is the only way of salvation, or that the Bible is the revealed will of God, or that Jesus was the unique Son of God.” Christianity is only one of many “mediators of the sacred.” [144] One certainly has to respect Borg’s belief system, but it is just that – belief. When one comes “out from fundamentalism,” as Borg has also done, if one is aware of the spiritual domain, and evangelicals are, one goes somewhere else, and it appears one often goes into some form of spiritual pagan monism. Is this why a Seminar member states with touching naivete that it is becoming more and more difficult to imagine a Jesus who reflected on his own death? The reason is because the belief-system of many modern Bible scholars, not the facts of the matter, has changed. So, at the end of the day, when all the science has been paraded, and all the claims of cold dispassionate scholarship touted aloud, one still cannot help but think that The Jesus Seminar is one more ideologically-loaded attempt to serve the revival of pantheistic spirituality in our time. Behind the science lies spiritual apostasy.
The marketing people know where Borg’s work belongs. The Many Paths…Infinite Possibilities…One Spirit Book Club, giving you “resources for your total well-being: spirit, mind and body,” offers selections in “self discovery, yoga, prayer, homeopathy, psychology, Ayurveda, Buddhism, astrology and Christianity.” One of the featured book, along with various titles like Celtic Magic, or The Druid, or An Encyclopaedia of Gods, or The Tarot Handbook or Awakening the Buddha Within is Borg’s Jesus and Buddha.
ROBERT FUNK
Robert Funk is the founder of The Jesus Seminar who is committed to bringing the fruits of his radical critical scholarship to the average Christian in the pew. According to Funk Christians need to mature in their knowledge and realize that most of what Jesus says in the Gospels was placed on his lips by later believers and that most authentic sayings of Jesus come from a hypothetical document, Q, which some scholars believe is embedded in Matthew and Luke, and from the heretical Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. In 1993 Funk published a best-selling book, The Five Gospels, setting this heretical text alongside the four canonical Gospels as an equally valid source for access to Jesus. [145] This is like asking Christ and Belial to share the Sunday morning service. This can only confuse the average Christian and promote the coming of pagan religious syncretism.
According to another Seminar fellow, Marcus Borg, in a taped public debate at the University of Oregon, his colleague Funk has a past as an evangelical fundamentalist that he still is attempting to live down. According to Borg, as a youth, Funk, dressed in a white suit and white shoes was pushed forward as a boy preacher. If anyone knows the hot-house atmosphere of certain milieu where children are used as cute “Christian” performers, one sympathizes with Funk. But escaping “out from fundamentalism,” is anything but a cold objective affair.
Funk has come a long way. He dedicates his book to Galileo “who altered our view of the heavens forever”; to Thomas Jefferson “who took scissors and paste to the gospels”; and to David Friedrich Strauss who “pioneered the quest for the historical Jesus.” [146]
Certainly the great scientist Galileo got an undeserving shaft from the church of his day, but should the work of Jefferson and Strauss on the Bible to be seen as “science” in anywhere near the same sense? Would anyone today accept the subjective Bible-study methods of Jefferson? With regard to Strauss, as a so-called biblical scientist, he is a most complex figure.
Strauss’s biographer documents that though held up as the great example of critical, dispassionate scholarship and the father of scientific research on the historical Jesus, Strauss was in deep fellowship with the occult. [147] Though his father Johann Friedrich Strauss was an orthodox Christian pietist, [148] early in his theological training David immersed himself in the mysticism of Jacob Böhme, in “spiritism, clairvoyance and sopiritual healing,” [149] and came to believe deeply in the supernatural, but “not…in any theistic sense, but rather as a belief in the pantheistic unity of the world.” [150] Strauss himself later recounts a meeting with a medium, the Seeress of Prevorst:
I cannot in my whole life remember such a comparable moment. I was absolutely convinced that as soon as I laid my hand in hers [the medium’s] my whole thinking and being would lie open before her….it was as if someone pulled the ground away from under my feet and I were sinking into a bottomless abyss….she [the medium] praised my faith, and…[said] that I would never fall into unbelief. [151]
According to this seeress, the father of modern New Testament scholarship would always be a believer – in occult pantheism, something Strauss never repudiated. How can someone with such deep religious convictions of a non-Christian nature, antipathetic to orthodoxy, make a believable claim to objectivity when dealing with a theistic document like the New Testament! Monists will always find theism unacceptable. With admirable consistency they will always eliminate any expressions of theism as a possible explanation of phenomena in the life of Jesus. Miracles, unique divine nature, atoning death for sin, God distinct from the creation He made, and inspired Scripture, to name just a few, are all elements intrinsic to a theistic world view which are “objectively” and “scientifically” screened out by monists as later additions to a Jesus they want to make much more amenable to their theology. At the end of the day, such a theological agenda determines from the start what Jesus can and cannot say. Monists can only produce a monistic Jesus. This might be good [monistic] theology but it is not science.
In the above mentioned lecture concerning the critique of Bultmann, Funk stated that we do not need a heavenly redeemer, because Joseph Campbell, amongst others, gives us an “internal redeemer.” Joseph Campbell, guru to George Lucas, one of the spiritual creators of Anakim, the “Balancer,” and Star Wars, [152] was an apostate Roman Catholic and Jungian, who sought wisdom in the pagan myths, and delivered much of it on public television. [153] He describes the calling of every human being, though born in one sex or the other, to transcend duality. This is to be done, as in the ancient mystery religions, by undergoing a series of initiations [or mystical experiences], whereby the individual “realizes that he is both mortal and immortal, male and female.” [154] Campbell was enamored of the goddess story because in it “the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity is not something ruling over and above a fallen nature.” [155] With his predilection for Strauss, Funk has also found the equivalent of Strauss’s seeress in the person of Campbell. Recently Funk and the Jesus Seminar created the Order of D. F. Strauss to honor scholars who excel in this tradition.
If there is a Jesus in the new, liberated world of tomorrow, he will fit all the parameters of this world’s new paganism. The Jesus Seminar will see to that. So much for their objective, neutral position. Stephen Neil and N. T. Wright identify the subjectivity:
Within the study of the history of religions there always tends to be a bias. However much most scholars declare their neutrality, there is always a sense that proving some element of Christianity to be derived from, say, Gnosticism, or Qumran, might have a hidden value-judgment attached to it. Students who fail to see this tend to get tired of the endless arguments about ‘background’: but once the agenda is revealed, the battle can be smelt, and its implications for wider issues all too easily imagined. In scholarship, as in international affairs, fighting often takes place on secondary battlefields, with the superpowers taking an active interest in apparently small-scale local skirmishes. [156]
Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God [157] argues that their view of Jesus “… is a particular view of Jesus, working its way through into a detailed list of sayings that fit with this view.”
A NEW VERSION OF CHRISTIANITY/THE END OF CHRISTIANITY
Here is the real goal. The New Jesus of the Jesus Seminar gives us a new Christianity for the global era. With their new Jesus, the Jesus Seminar feels authorized to address the question of God, with the stated starting point: “It is no longer credible to think that there is a God ‘out there.'” [158]
John Shelby Spong, promoted by the Jesus Seminar‘s Westar Institute, gives us A New Christianity for a New World. Spong’s mentor was J. A. T. Robinson, who popularised Tillich in the English-speaking world, and defended the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. [159] Spong claims that stand helped him take a new view of sexuality, which presently includes him being the religion editor on a pornographic website. [160]
Spong credits Lloyd Geering for creating “an audience for me in New Zealand and Australia.” [161] Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University, considered one of New Zealand’s foremost thinkers, described by Bishop Spong as a “Presbyterian heretic,” [162] Geering takes this moment of human history very seriously, setting tomorrow’s global culture in the context of Western intellectual history. Embraced by the Jesus Seminar, Geering’s books [163] are promoted as programmatic essays for the future earth community-from the point of view of Christian apostasy and pagan orthodoxy.
In other words, this pagan New Testament scholarship finds its “theological” expression in Geering’s radical agenda According to Geering, tomorrow’s culture will be post-Christian, global, and religiously pagan. This agenda is remarkably similar to that found in the ex-Roman Catholic Thomas Berry, The Great Work, which is working its way not simply through biblical texts but through the texts of the UN’s global programs.
TOMORROW’S CULTURE WILL BE POST-CHRISTIAN
This is because evolution proves that human beings, as they evolved, created language, then symbols, then religious explanations. The most recent human religious inventions are the monotheistic divine Creator of all things, and the dualism between the spiritual realm of a God who is believed to really exist, and the realm of created life. Classic Christian theology has called this the Creator/creature distinction. However, according to Geering, “The other-world of the dualistic picture…has been slowly dissolving from Western consciousness…,” not least “through the most serious condemnation of traditional monotheism,…by feminist thought.” [164]
Geering, following Spong, is thus categorical in his rejection of the God of the Bible: “The time for glorifying the Almighty (male) God who supposedly rules is now over.” [165] The end of Christianity is so evident “that some future generation may well be moved to discard the Christian calendar entirely, and rename the year 2000 AD as 1 GE, the first year of the global era. [166] Soon the Lord’s Supper will only signify human fellowship, and Christmas will be a holiday for the celebration of family.
TOMORROW’S CULTURE WILL BE GLOBALThis is because we live at a moment in time where “the process by which all scientific, cultural, religious and economic human activity is being integrated into one worldwide network.” [167] Thus Geering believes “the UN’s time has finally come. It is only within the framework of that global organization that the common problems of mankind can be collectively addressed.” [168] Global consciousness is causing us “to discover and acknowledge both cultural diversity and cultural relativity,” [169] as well as to create “one unified species [through] a global consciousness/super-consciousness.” [170] This possibility leads the analytical intellectual, Geering, to deep expressions of optimistic spirituality, “…possibly the human species,” opines Geering, “…could become so united in love and goodwill that there would be some kind of spiritual center…” [171] Indeed, this possibility becomes a requirement. “If the global society emerges, it will require humanity to develop a new consciousness and a new form of spirituality.” [172] So, what kind of new spirituality will this be?
TOMORROW’S CULTURE WILL BE RELIGIOUSLY PAGAN
This is so because “the new story,” which has become basic to the global world, begins with a new word or idea:…evolution. Geering takes this word “in its broadest sense of change and development from within.” [173] Following the logic of his thoughts, he states unambiguously: “Unlike the dualistic character of the Christian world, the new global world is monistic [italics mine]. That means that the universe is conceived as essentially one…” Of course, this is not new. It is classic spiritual paganism, and Geering, in spite of his all-pervading explanatory principle of evolutionary progress, has to admit with “surprise” that ” the new story has… . “link[s] with the pre-[monotheistic]…nature religions in which the ancients thought of themselves as the children of the earth mother.” In an odd turn of events, contemporary “spiritual” evolution goes backwards! Biblical theism disturbed our evolutionary progress. The clocks have to be put back. As C. S. Lewis said some fifty years ago, noting religious paganism’s perennial character, [he called it ‘pantheism’], and its appearance in Nazi ideology, even as he wrote: “…by a strange irony, each new relapse into this immemorial ‘religion’ is hailed as the last work in novelty and emancipation…so far from being the final refinement, pantheism is, in fact, the permanent natural bent of the human mind.” [174]
Not surprisingly, the same old symbol, Geering believes, will serve for the spanking new future planetary religion. In the religion of the coming global society “Mother Earth would be the a consciously chosen symbol referring to everything about the earth’s eco-system.” He notes that “The loving care of Mother Earth is in many quarters replacing the former sense of obedience to the Heavenly Father.” [175] …In the religion of the coming global society, the forces of nature, the process of evolution and the existence of life itself will be the objects of…veneration.” [176] Again, this is pure paganism, as the New Testament affirms-“worship of the creation rather than the Creator.” [177] These expressions, without surprise, fit naturally “the Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese notions of non-theistic spirituality,” so a coming together of all the pagan religions is on the cards. [178] Sounding like a paragon of tolerance, Geering states: “There will not be ‘only one way’…groups must learn to be inclusive…” [179] In other words, there will only be the “one, inclusive, pagan, way,” and this “must” be the case. This is not tolerance, but a veiled and hence dangerous form of intolerance-but, for the survival of the planet, this is the way it must be!
We are in the presence of a powerful pagan/Gnostic theological agenda, claiming to be spanking new, objective and scientific, but as old as the hills. It is my belief that this trend in biblical studies is part of the setting in place of a pagan reconstruction of human culture for the planetary era.
I close this lecture with a warning that comes from a scholar whose work is independent of my own. Johannes van Oort, Professor of church history and the history of dogma at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, and world expert on Manichean Gnosticism, states a fact and gives a challenge: “…Gnosis in one form or another is expected to become the main expression of secular religion in the new millennium. In order to equip the Church for this new age, the scientific study of Gnosticism is vital.” [180]
Notes
[1] Peter Jones, after teaching the New Testament in Europe and the USA, is now Scholar-in-residence at Westminster Seminary in California and Director of truthXchange (website: truthxchange.com).
[2] I use the terms “Gnosticism” and “paganism” virtually interchangeably, for the following reasons. Paganism is the general religious belief in the divinity of Nature; Gnosticism is a specific and somewhat rarified application of that general belief that becomes associated with the early Christian movement. I thus agree with the early church fathers, who, according to modern scholarship, falsely described Gnosticism as a “relapse in heathenism.” Kurt Rudolf, Gnosis: The Nature and History of An Ancient Religion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1977), 9. Here, Rudolf is implicitly critical of this association. It is, though, the position of very gifted theologians/Church Fathers, such as Hippolytus, who stated that the Gnostics took their doctrine from “the wisdom of the heathen.” [ibid., 14]. Much later in his book [225], Rudolf documents that many Gnostics “fostered a cult of images, owning statues of gods such as those found among the archeological remains of the mystery cults.” See also p. 226 for further evidence. Somewhere, I recall, but I have not been able to trace it, Kurt Rudolf describes Gnosticism as dualism on a monistic background.
[3] J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Eerdmans, 1923), pp.62-63.
[4] See Pearson, 21.
[5] Philo, Leg. All. 3:161, where he speaks of the soul as a “divine fragment.”
[6] See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 42-43, who sees radical dualism as the “cardinal feature” of Gnosticism. For the similarity between later Gnosticism and Philo, see the Nag Hammadi text, On The Origin of The World 117:29-35, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), 173: “Now the first Adam of light is spiritual. He appeared on the first day. The second Adam is soul endowed. He appeared on the sixth day, and is called <Herm>aphrodite<s>.” Bentely Layton, in NAG Hammjadi Codex II, 2-7, vol 2 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), 71, proposes “pneumatikos” and “psykhikos,” which the Coptic clearly indicates. Since these terms are not found in Philo, later Gnosticism must have taken Paul’s terms and read them into a Philonic reading of Genesis. I am indebted to my student, Joshua Smith, for pointing out this reference to Layton.
[7] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 326.
[8] Ibid., 325.
[9] Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, ed. U. Bianchi, Numen vol 12 (Leiden, 1967), 100f. Irenaeus gives proof of this notion, in his ingenious argument against the Gnostic theory of consubstantiality, that is, the confusing of God and the creation. If, he argues, the emitted eon shares the same substance with the emitter, then the limited characteristics of the emitted eon (passability, ignorance) are shared by the emitter (Adv. Haereses II:17, 4-5).
[10] Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, “An Interpretation of Logion 114 in the Gospel of Thomas, Novum Testamentum XXVII(1985), 246. See also H. Rengsdorf, “Urchristliches Kerygma und ‘gnostische’ Interpretation in einigen Sprűchen des Thomasevangelium,” Ugo Bianchi, ed., Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, Numen vol 12 (Leiden, 1967), 567, who sees a reference in the phrase “living spirit” in logion 114 to Paul’s “spirit that gives life,” and wonders if Isis mythology, where Isis becomes a male has influences Egyptian Gnosticism.
[11] This is doubtless a reference to original androgyny, the spiritual state beyond male and female-as a number of scholars propose-see Buckley, 246, and not an expression of Thomas’ male chauvinism, as Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), 49, believed, though later in her book retracted (p. 67).
[12] Jonas, ibid., 328.
[13] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 43. The Gnostics turned the biblical names for God into proper names for inferior, demonic beings.
[14] For Jahweh as a “fool”, see Sophia of Jesus Christ 112:19; 114:14-25; On the Origin of the World 100:5-10, 26-27; Apocalypse of Adam 64:14-16; Apocryphon of John 15-19 cp 21:30; Letter of Peter to Philip 135:16. Texts describing Jahweh cast into hell are Hypostasis of the Archons 95:8ff; On the Origin of the World 103:25; 126:20-30. See also Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, translated by Anthony Alcock (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990),132. Many of the Nag Hammadi texts seek in some way to undermine the teaching of Genesis 1-3, indicating a fundamental antipathy to the biblical notion of creation. According to Elaine Pagels, “‘The Mystery of the Resurrection’: A Gnostic Reading of 1 Corinthians 15,” JBL 93 (1974), 276-288, the Gnostics believed in the resurrection but not the way the church understood it. According to Origen the Gnostics do not believe in the resurrection of this flesh and they consider belief in bodily resurrection the “faith of fools.” (Pagels, 278). This is not simply another approach to the same subject, as Pagels suggests. Since Paul also dismisses Christians who refuse to believe in bodily resurrection as “fools” (15:36), we are clearly confronted again with mutually exclusive world views.
[15] The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 489.
[16] Cited in R. J. Hoffmann, Marcion (Chico, CA.: Scholars Press, 1984), 110-111.
[17] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3:3:4.
[18] Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament: Volume 2: History and Literature of Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 330.
[19] James M. Robinson, “Introduction,” The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 3, 6, 7, 16 and 24. Eight times in this introduction to the critical edition of the Gnostic texts, Robinson describes the anti-Gnostic church fathers this way.
[20] In the volume, published in Koester’s honor, The future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 472.
[21] James M. Robinson, “How My Mind Has changed,” SBL Papers (1984), 481.
[22] David Ferguson, O.P., Bultmann: Outstanding Christian Thinkers Series (Collegeville, MN.: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 95.
[23] John K. Riches, A Century of New Testament Study (Valley forge, PA.: Trinity Press International, 1993), 84, 176.
[24] James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English , 1.
[25] Rudolf, Gnosis, 54.
[26] Jonas, 332.
[27] Jonas, 332.
[28] Jonas, 333.
[29] Jonas, 334.
[30] R. Bultmann, Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, ed. and tr. By Schubert Ogden (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1961), 258ff.
[31] Roberts, 211.
[32] Ladd, 33.
[33] Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 28
[34] Ladd, 39.
[35] Bultmann, TNT I, 191
[36] Schmithals, 63.
[37] Schmithals, 72-3. According to Stanislav Grof Future of Psychology: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 44, citing Riedlinger, 1982), Jean-Paul Satre’s work on existentialism was “deeply influenced by a badly managed and unresolved mescaline session…”
[38] KM, 18ff, see Roberts, 42
[39] KM, 27.
[40] Roberts, 43, fn. 48: “Bult does, of course, have a stake in preserving the possibility of an objective description of “existence” along the lines of Heidegger’s Being and Time.”
[41] Schmithals, 64.
[42] Roberts, 212.
[43] Roberts, 212.
[44] Thiselton, Two Horizons, 227:
[45] Schmithals, 16.
[46] Edward T. Oakes, S.J., “Being and Nazism: The Problem of Martin Heidegger,” The Weekly Standard, (August 3, 1998), 33-35. Oakes is professor of religion at Regis University in Denver, Colorado.
[47] Caputo, 170. Cp. Thomas Berry.
[48] Caputo, 175.
[49] Caputo, 177-178.
[50] See William E. Hughes, “The People versus Martin Heidegger,” First Things (December, 1993)35-36.
[51] Oakes, art. cit., 33, refers to the biography of Heidegger by Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, transl. By Ewald Osers (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998). See especially John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1993), 118ff, and 168ff, who argues that the source of his ethical insensitivity and political blindness arose as Heidegger explained Being from Greek philosophy and its expression in National Socialism, while excluding everything Jewish and Christian, especially the biblical ethics of justice and mercy. See also the statement of Otto Poegoller, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, transl. Dan Margushak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987), 272: “Was it not through a definite orientation of this thought that Heidegger fell-and not merely accidentally-into the proximity of National Socialism without ever truly emerging from this proximity.” Cited by Caputo, ibid., 5.
[52] Robinson, 8.
[53] Robinson, 11.
[54] Robinson, 12.
[55] Caputo, 184, though he is referring particularly, here, to the later Heidegger. “Heidegger’s later writings are more suggestive of a certain Buddhism…than of Judaism and Christianity and the emancipatory power of biblical justice.” More generally, John Macquarrie, Heidegger and Christianity: The Hensley Lectures 1993-1994 (New York: Continuum, 1994), 100, states: “I am inclined to agree…that ‘pantheism accords well with Heidegger’s religious statements.'”
[56] Robinson, 21.
[57] Robinson, 20.
[58] Robinson, 20.
[59] Robinson, 23.
[60] Robinson, ibid., 8.
[61] James M. Robinson, “The German Discussion,” The Later Heidegger and Theology, ed. James Robinson and John B. Cobb. Jr., (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 4.
[62] Schmithals, 15.
[63] Casuto, 173
[64] Schmithals, 15. See also John D. Caputo, 7, who sees the later Heidegger already in the early.
[65] Robinson, The Later Heidegger, 7.
[66] Walter Schmithals, An Introduction to The Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1968), 115, citing Kerygma and Myth, 20.
[67] Schmithtals, 134.
[68] Schmithals, 134. A. H. B. Logan, “At-Onement: The Nature of the Challenge of Gnostic Soteriology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 5 (4. 97), 481-497, Compares Valentinian soteriology with that of Bultmann.
[69] The words of Schmithals, 76.
[70] H. Ridderbos, Bultmann, tr. by David Freeman (Phillipsberg, NJ.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1979), 45
[71] Ridddrbos, 45-6.
[72] See Robert C. Roberts, Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology: A Critical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 323.
[73] Roberts, 324.
[74] Ladd, 40.
[75] James Robinson, “How My Mind Has changed,” SBL Papers (1984), 486.
[76] James M. Robinson, ed., The Later Heidegger and Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
[77] Robinson, The Later Heidegger, 5.
[78] Caputo, 180.
[79] Caputo, 180.
[80] Caputo, 170.
[81] Capuato, 177.
[82] Vortrage und Aufsatze, (Neske, 1954), 177.
[83] Capuato, 180-181. See also Macquarrie, ibid., 105.
[84] Caputo, 179. See also John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). In his later work, Demythologizing Heidegger (1993) Casuto becomes much more critical of this mysticism.
[85] Capuato, 183. MacQuarrie, 98, wonders if the mystics like Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, even Heidegger perceived Being in some “ecstatic flight.” Macquarrie calls him a neo-Platonist.
[86] Robinson, ibid., 5.
[87] Robinson, 34.
[88] MacQuarrie, ibid., 100.
[89] John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1993), 168ff.
[90] Ibid.
[91] John Macquarrie, Heidegger and Christianity: The Hensley Henson Lectures 1993-1994 (New York: Continuum, 1994), 94.
[92] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 332.
[93] MacQuarrie, ibid., 95
[94] Caputo, 184.
[95] Robinson, 63.
[96] Philip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics, (New York : Oxford University Press, 1987), 84.
[97] Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 1.
[98] “How My Mind Has Changed,” 495.
[99] See William Farmer, “The Church’s Stake in the Question of ‘Q’,” Perkins Journal, 39/3 (1986), 10.
[100] Robert Funk, “Three Tributes to James M. Robinson,” Foundations and Facets 5/2 (Sonoma, CA.: Polebridge Press, 1989), 6.
[101] James M. Robinson, Interpretation 25 (January, 1971), 63-77.
[102] A recent attempt to do the same, by one of Koester’s students, is Elaine Pagel’s Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003), which seeks to rehabilitate Gnosticism by the same ideological commitment to religious relativism.
[103]James McConkey Robinson, and Helmut H. Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity, (Philadelphia, Fortress Press 1971).
[104] Helmut H. Koester, “One Jeus and Four Primitive Gospels,” Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968), 203-247.
[105] Robinson, How My Mind Has changed,” 486.
[106] Helmut Koester, The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,1991), 474.
[107] Ibid., 475-476.
[108] The Muratorian Canon, line 67.
[109] Stephen Prothero, “Addition or Subtraction: a review of Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Martin Bauman (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2002),” Buddhadharma (Spring, 2003), 65.
[110] Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
[111] Ibid., 473.
[112] Duncan Greenlees, The Gospel of the Gnostics (Madras, India: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1958), vii.
[113] N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis : Fortress Press, 1996), 73.
[114] Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar has a new book, Honest to Jesus: Jesus For a New Millennium (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). See also, US News and World Report (August 4, 1997), 55.
[115] Marcus Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teaching of Jesus (New York/Toronto: Edwin Mellen, 1984); Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).
[116] So declared Koester, in Trajectories, 270.
[117] See Robert Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 1.
[118] Arland D. Jacobson, The First Gospel: An Introduction to Q (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1992).
[119]. Burton L. Mack (also a member of the Jesus Seminar), The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).
[120] This is another offering by Polebridge Press – John S. Kloppenborg, Marvin W. Meyer, Stephen J. Patterson and Michael G. Steinhauser, Q Thomas Reader (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1990).
[121] Ibid. See also the judgment of Hobbs in 1980: “There is no serenity in the field of the sources of the Gospels, there are no longer `assured results of scholarship…'”
[122] A lecture given at Drew University in 1983, published as “The Sayings of Jesus:Q,” Drew Gateway (Fall, 1983), 26-38, cited in Farmer, “The Church’s Stake,” 15.
[123] Farmer, “The Church’s Stake,” 15. See also S. Petrie, “Q Is Only What You Make It,” Novum Testamentum 3 (1959), cited by Wenham, Redating, 42. See Jones, Gnostic Empire, 105, n.34, where a portion of this article is cited. In 1989 a similar judgment about Q was made by Hobbs, “A Quarter-Century Without Q,” 13: “No reconstruction of Q has gained anything like overwhelming acceptance.”
[124]. A. M. Farrer, “On Dispensing With Q,” Studies In The Gospels, ed. D. E. Nineham (Oxford: University Press, 1955).
[125] M. D. Goulder, a radical critic, nevertheless finds Farrer’s arguments still convincing in 1980. See his “Farrer on Q,” Theology 83 (1980), 190-195, and also his “On Putting Q To the Test,” New Testament Studies 24 (1978), 218-234.
[126] See the article by Edward C. Hobbs, professor of theology at the Graduate Theological Union, and the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California, “A Quarter-Century Without `Q’,” Perkins Journal 33 (Summer, 1980), 10.
[127] Art.cit., 19. In the judgment of Hobbs (in somewhat purple prose): “very few are owed so much by so many as Austin Farrer is owed. He is dead these ten years; the posterity of his work lives after him, to declare his wisdom and to summon his successors to honor him, as in fact we do this day.” William Farmer, “The Church’s Stake,” 16, still cites Farrer’s argument as unanswered in 1986.
[128] Miller, “The Gospels that Did Not Make the Cut,” 15. See also his introduction to The Complete Gospels, xi, where he boasts that the work is “free of ecclesiastical and religious control.” Is Miller naive enough to think that Funk did not bring together a group of scholars with a religious pre-commitment?
[129] The studied attempt at objectivity is undermined by the ideological homogeneity of the Seminar members assembled by Robert Funk, most of whom would doubtless call themselves theological liberals. Beyond that one may well wonder how much these scholars are representative of world-wide New Testament scholarship.
[130] The Five gospels, 1.
[131] Ibid., 2.
[132] Ibid., 34.
[133] Ibid., 5.
[134] James M. Robinson, “How My Mind Has changed,” SBL Papers (1984), 482.
[135] .From a letter to the present author, dated Friday, 25 November, 1994.
[136] Ibid., 481. In recounting his thoughts as a young scholar, choosing between the conservative Oscar Cullmann and the radical Rudolf Bultmann, he states: “…with Cullmann one had nowhere to go, whereas with Bultmann one had the agenda for a meaningful lifetime of research.”
[137] James M. Robinson, “How My Mind Has Changed,” 482.
[138] James Robinson, Nag Hammadi in English, 3.
[139]. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993).
[140] Marcus J. Borg, “Me and Jesus: The Journey Home,” The Fourth R (July/August 1993), 9.
[141]. Scott McKnight, “Who is Jesus: An Introduction to Jesus Studies,” Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Re-invents the Historical Jesus, ed. Michael J. Wilkin and J. P. Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 70, n.22. Professor McKnight here mentions a master’s thesis written under his direction at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School by Dana K. Ostby, “The Historical Jesus and the Supernatural World: A Shift in the Modern Critical Worldview with Special Emphasis on the Writings of Marcus Borg,” 1991, which traces Borg’s theological development.
[142] . Alan Morrison, The Serpent and the Cross: Religious Corruption in an Evil Age (Birmingham, UK: K&M Books, 1994), 568. Huston Smith has published with the Theosophical Publishing House of Wheaton, Illinois [Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Wheaton, Ill: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989)] . Readers will recall that the Theosophical Society was founded towards the end of the nineteenth century by the spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, and later propagated by Annie Besant, and that both women are now considered foremothers of the New Age. An authority on the history of the occult calls the Theosophical Society “the very pillar of the late nineteenth century revival of the occult,” according to James Webb, The Occult Establishment (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1976), 25 and 553.
[143] Borg, “Me and Jesus,” 9.
[144] Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
[145] Ibid., dedication page.
[146] The following information is drawn from Horton Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology (Cambridge: The University Press, 1973).
[147] Ibid., 2.
[148] Ibid., 14.
[149] Ibid., 13.
[150] Strauss’ Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Zeller, 1876-78, cited in Harris, ibid., 16.
[151] George Lucas recognized Campbell as one of his spiritual mentors, and Campbell was a constant guest a the Skywalker Ranch.
[152] In a PBS series, shown in the late 80s. One must not miss the irony of tax-payer money being used to promote a deeply religious, anti-Christian, prosyletizing apology for pagan spirituality.
[153] Joseph Campbell, The Power Of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 58.
[154] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, 121. Interestingly, Jung, whom Campbell followed, was fascinated by the Mother-Goddess cults which he believed expressed the truth about reality-see Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 161-176.
[155] Stephen Neil and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1961-1986. Second edition (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 369.
[156] Jesus and the Victory of God, 33.
[157] The Fourth R (August, 2000), 17.
[158] John A. T. Robinson, “The Mentor Who Shaped My Ministry,” The Fourth R 15/5 (September/October, 2002), 17.
[159] Called The Position.
[160] Ibid.
[161] John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change Or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile (San Francisco: Harper, 1999), xviii.
[162] Lloyd Geering, The World to Come: From Christian Past to Global Future (Polebridge Press, 1999), and Tomorrow’s God: How We Create Our Worlds (Polebridge, 2000).
[163] Geering, Tomorrow’s God, 130.
[164] Geering, Tomorrow’s God, 131.
[165] 107.
[166] 147.
[167] 152. Already the UN seems ready to make reality what is still a theoretical utopia. Kofi Annan urges “a global society for all,” abcnews.go.com (07/02/2001). He believes that “humanity is indivisible” (Insight Mag.com, October 4, 2000), and promises a world without want and without fear.
[168] 102.
[169] 104.
[170] 105. The warning of Roman Catholic philosopher, Thomas Molnar (Utopia, 217), needs to be heard: “…the very idea of planetary unity assumes the existence of a new and mature mankind which is capable of transcending all evils which used to mark the old mankind…[a] ‘new man.'” This, of course, is why utopians like Geering must propose a religious solution, for only from religion can one hope for a transformed humaniaty, which raises the following question: can religious paganism transform fallen mankind?
[171] 149.
[172] 147.
[173] C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: The MacMillan Publishing Company/Collier Books, 1947), 82-3.
[174] 157.
[175] 158.
[176] 157.
[177] Romans 1:25.
[178] See p. 154: “All religious traditions will contribute…and those that can respond most flexibly…to the current challenges are likely to offer the most.”
[179] 160.
[180] Johannes van Oort, “New Light on Christian Gnosis,” Louvain Studies 24 (1999), 26,
February 1, 2003 by Dr. Peter Jones
INTRODUCTION
Given the institutions where I have taught during my professional life, it is appropriate to begin my overview of the Paganization/Gnosticization [2] of New Testament Studies with a quote from J. Gresham Machen, speaking of the inroads of Liberalism into the American church at the beginning of the last century:
“The truth is that liberalism has lost sight of the very centre and core of the Christian teaching. In the Christian view of God as set forth in the Bible, there are many elements. But one attribute of God is absolutely fundamental in the Bible; one attribute is absolutely necessary in order to render intelligible all the rest. That attribute is the awful transcendence of God. From beginning to end the Bible is concerned to set forth the awful gulf that separates the creature from the Creator. It is true, indeed, that according to the Bible God is immanent in the world. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him. But He is immanent in the world not because He is identified with the world, but because He is the free Creator and upholder of it. Between the creature and the Creator a great gulf is fixed.” [3]
To be sure, Machen does mention Gnosticism, but he does define the essence it religious belief. Gnosticism, which builds on the common pagan notion of humanity as divine. Plato taught that the soul “was immortal by its very nature.” [4] This notion is integrated into Jewish thinking by Philo, [5] and developed by later Gnosticism as the alien “divine spark” within humanity. [6] Hans Jonas defines Gnosticism as radically dualistic-a dualism between man and the world,” [7] an anthropological a-cosmism.” [8] “The essence of man is knowledge, of the self and God.” As the famous Messina Colloquium on Gnosticism in 1966 clearly recognized, “the idea of divine consubstantiality” is a defining notion of Gnosticism. [9] Such a notion effectively eliminates the uniqueness and transcendence of God.
The Gospel of Thomas appears to reflect this notion in its view of redemption, proposing a “‘backwards’ creation” for Mary, moving from the “female rib into the male Adam, and back into the ‘living spirit.'” [10] This is nothing less than the undoing of creation, expressed most powerfully in sexual/gender transformation and liberation. There is here proposed the destruction of the opposites and a return to primordial unity. [11] The cosmos is an ordered universe, but “an order with a vengeance, alien to man’s aspirations.” [12] Such a world view eventually finds the biblical notion of a transcendent Creator, distinct from the creation, creating an ordered cosmos, as insufferable foolishness; indeed, the epitome of evil, [13] and Jahweh is unceremoniously thrown into Hell. [14]
The essence of liberalism throughout its history is the importation into the church via the use of Christian terminology, of the various historic expressions of pagan notions, in particular, the denial of God’s transcendence. In this sense, the first “liberals” were the Gnostics. Certainly a form of Gnosticism, sometimes called proto-Gnosticism is behind the denial of the incarnation in the Johannine epistles, and of the resurrection in the early and later Paulines. Interestingly, the Liberals of the modern period have had great admiration for the proto-Gnostics, in particular, Marcion. In A.D. 150, Marcion, a theologian from Pontus in Asia Minor, was excommunicated from the Church in Rome for heretical teaching. He dismissed God the Creator, the Old Testament, the Mosaic Law, and three of the gospels. From the few epistles of Paul that he accepted, he expunged Old Testament quotations and claimed to worship the “alien god” behind the God of Scripture. [15] Tertullian (AD 160‑225) called Marcion “the Pontic mouse who has nibbled away the Gospels . . . abolished marriage,” and . . . tore God almighty to bits with [his] blasphemies,” [16] and Polycarp (A.D. 69‑155), who knew the apostle John, called Marcion “the first‑born of Satan.” [17]
In spite of Marcion’s massive rejection of early Christian orthodoxy, and his denunciation and excommunication by the second century Church, the great nineteenth century Liberal historian and theologian, Adolf von Harnack, called Marcion “the first Protestant.” For Harnack, “Protestant” meant “liberal.” The similarly sympathetic judgment by Helmut Koester, a Bultmannian New Testament scholar, lately at Harvard, calls Marcion “a textual critic, philologian and reformer.” [18] When these church fathers are dismissed by contemporary liberal scholars as “myopic heresy hunters,” [19] and the terms “Protestant” and “reformer” are associated with the Gnostic Marcion, making him a virtual second-century Martin Luther, we must see that we are in the presence of a “palace revolution.” The popularity of Marcion can only be understood in the light of the present-day Gnosticization of Biblical Studies. Liberal Lutheran Koester is disarmingly clear. He urges scholars to abandon the New Testament canon in order to allow the other early Christian voices–“heretics, Marcionites, Gnosticism, Jewish Christians, perhaps also women—. . . to be heard again.” [20] The contemporary promotion of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts as a valid expression of early Christianity is a further example of liberalism’s predilection for Gnosticism. This is in no sense a “reformation”: it is rather a profound revisionism of Christian history leading to a major theological revolution, namely, the normalization of heretical Gnosticism in contemporary mainline Christianity.
As at the time of Gnosticism, today the great biblical doctrine under attack like no other is the doctrine of God the transcendent Creator. In this sense, Gnosticism has returned to the Church with a vengeance.
RUDOLF BULTMANN
The role of Gnosticism in the paganization of Biblical Studies was initially the result of the work of one man, Rudolf Bultmann. One cannot underestimate the importance and influence of Bultmann. Schmithals, An Introduction to the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (1967), 1: “…no living theologian’s work is noted and discussed more than that of RB. B is for our time what Karl Barth was to the German speaking world between the two world wars. The main difference is that B’s theology has aroused lively interest transcending all boundaries of churches, languages and indeed religions…” “…one of the theological giants of the twentieth century.” David Ferguson, Bultmann (1992), viii. Of very few is it said: his work is “a towering achievement.” James Robinson says, “The new quest…the later Heidegger, hermeneutic and Gnosticism find in Bultmann their unity.” [21]
Bultmann believed a great deal of the NT, especially John and Paul, had profound relationships with Gnosticism. [22] TNT I, 165: “Whereas to ancient man the world had become home-in the OT as God’s creation, to classic Greece as the cosmos pervaded by the deity-the utter difference of human existence from all worldly existence was recognized for the first time in Gnosticism and Christianity, and thus the world became foreign soil to the human self.”
He claimed that “the cosmological dualism of Gnosticism has become in John a dualism of decision.”(TNT II, 21). Though he only had knowledge of pre-Nag Hammadi Gnosticism, and wrongly believed that the Gnostic redeemer myth is at the base of Christology, which has never been established, [23] he did understand the Gnostic impulse.
Bultmann’s fascination with Gnosticism doubtless arose from the connection he saw between it and 20th century existentialism which was Bultmann’s fundamental inspiration for understanding the NT. James Robinson makes the same connection, characterizing the ancient Gnostics as the “dropouts” of Roman imperial society, comparing them to the “counter‑culture movements coming from the 60’s.” [24] Rudolf calls their interpretations of Scripture as “protest exegesis,” [25] and Hans Jonas draws fascinating parallels between ancient Gnosticism and modern exxistentialism. Heidegger’s view of God, according to Jonas, approximates to that of the Gnostics, who is the “other, the unknown.” [26] This God, says Jonas, is “a nihilistic conception: no nomos emanates from him, no law for nature and thus none for human action…” [27] In Gnosticism, the true pneumatic is radically free from psychical essence; in existentialism no “determinative essence is permitted to prejudice the freely self-projecting existence.” [28] Jonas notes that Heidegger’s description of Dasein as “having being thrown”-Geworfenheit, is originally a Gnostic notion, because in the Mandean literature it is “a standing phrase: life has been thrown into the world…the soul into the body.” [29]
Bultmann made existentialism his heuristic principle for unlocking the code of the NT message. George Eldon Ladd, Bultmann (Chicago: Inter-Varsity Press, 1964), 30: “The heart of Bultmann’s positive message [is] the interpretation of the gospel in terms of authentic [eschatological]existence.” Indeed, Heidegger and Bultmann did joint seminars together at Marburg, and to Heidegger Bultmann dedicated Faith and Understanding, the first volume of his collected essays, in 1933. [Tillich was another colleague at Marburg during that period].
…the work of existential philosophy, which I came to know through my discussion with Martin Heidegger, has become of decisive significance for me. I found in it the conceptuality in which it is possible to speak adequately of human existence and therefore also of the existence of the believer. [30]
Without this philosophy, “it is a mistake to think we can understand a word of the New Testament”; without it, the Scripture will have nothing to say to the present.” [31]
Bultmann believed that Heidegger’s existentialist analysis of the structure of being “is nothing more than a secularized, philosophical version of the New Testament’s view of human existence.” The difference is that Jesus makes authenticity happen, by faith. [32]: Bultmann said about Heidegger: “I learned from him not what theology has to say but how it has to say it.” Or again, “…we all not necessarily subscribe to Heidegger’s philosophical theories when we learn something from his existential analysis.” [33]
Taking Heidegger’s analysis as the grid of interpretation, “revelation” is not God’s self-disclosure. It must be understood in existential terms…[about me and my future, not revelation about God or cosmology or the future of the world]. Theology must arise out of anthropology.[34] As Bultmann says, “Paul’s theology is, at the same time, anthropology.” [35] According to Schmithals, Heidegger asks the question of being in a new way, not in terms of the cosmos, but in an analysis of human existence. Human existence, according to Heidegger means that man [in the words of Schmithals] “always has himself before himself as his own possibility; to exist in an authentic way means to keep oneself open at all times for…the future.” [36] If man is his own possibility, authentic existence means to keep oneself open for the future. According to Heidegger, “Dasein has Always fallen away from itself and into the world…It goes over to the world. It allows itself to be determined…by the world…which is nothingness. All this happens on the basis of an anxiety in which the insignificance of my Dasein and the nothingness of the world dawn upon me.” [37]
Bultmann boldly affirms that the observer has no objective place on which to stand from which to observe reality.[38] He thus anticipates the postmodern critique of modernity. Bultmann nevertheless observes existence-with the aid of existentialism, which gives “the ontological structure of being.” [39] In other words, he does claim to make statements about existence, but inevitably from within a world view and its presuppositions about existence. [40] Bultmann calls this “pre-understanding.” It is an appropriate or “right philosophy.” [41] He calls this “a scientific-religious understanding of the ontological and abstract features of the understanding of existence which lie behind the particular beliefs of the [New Testament] writers.” [42] “…real meaning yielded by existential analysis is for Bultmann the meaning of Scripture as the word of God.” [43] In other words, existential analysis is the word of God. This makes what is believed to be inherent within nature the determining truth about existence. This is surely a fundamentally pagan concept of knowledge and truth, which eliminates the transcended Lord and Creator and special revelation. G. Kuhlmann argues that Bultmann’s dependence on Heidegger means that he only ever describes the “natural” man. [44] Bultmann argues that Christian theology gives the “how”: philosophy only describes the “that.” Bultmann states that Heidegger’s philosophy was “atheistic” in the sense that God is not the subject of the philosophy of the early Heidegger, thus leaving room for theology. [45]
THE EARLY HEIDEGGER
Heidegger was certainly one of the great philosophers of the modern age, certainly, but two things catch my attention: 1. his moral failings, and, 2. his religious commitments, which perhaps get to the heart of the man and his thought.
Heidegger’s major moral failings included his commitment to Nazism, which he never ever repudiated, and the decades-long affair he had with his major apologist in the English-speaking world and former student, Hannah Arendt. Edward Oakes believes these were not blind spots but failures that flowed directly from his philosophy. [46]
Heidegger’s religious commitments trace the course of his life. He began “as an ultraconservative Catholic, destined for the priesthood, [47] after 1917 bec[a]me deeply involved in a dailogue with liberal Protestant historical theology. After 1928 Heidegger deeply antagonistic to, even an aggressive opponent of, Christianity.” [48] In 1928 he also became an enthusiastic reader of Nietzsche, where the myth of Being is purged of any Jewish or Christian notions, and his philosophy became Judenrein. [49]
His rejection of Catholicism included his denial of metaphysics, that is, in essence, the biblical account of existence, which includes the transcendent God of Creation. In the name of human existence, Heidegger denies the biblical doctrine of God and creation. For him there is no such thing as “human nature” nor purpose to human existence save the freedom of “self-actualization.” This notion fundamentally undermined any concept of objective morality. [50] These two notions, self-actualization and the lack of objective morality doubtless explain his interest in National Socialism. [51]
Grounding Dasein in freedom “as the inner source of its possibility,” against traditional metaphysics, certainly accords with a Gnostic view of existence. [52] In Gnosticism, freedom is likewise gained via the elimination of the transcendent God of Scripture. Heidegger does not ground the reality of Dasein in God but in its own structure, in nothing outside of itself. This is its the ultimate transcendence. [53] It cannot transcend to something outside itself. There is nothing out there.
Realizing the failure of traditional metaphysics thus brings one to the fact of nothing outside of being, so that the arrival at nothing unveils being. [54] In this account of existence there are shades of Buddhism, as a number of scholars have pointed out. [55] Heidegger seeks to root objective thought “in something more primal than a metaphysically understood subject.” [56] In other contemporary words of Harold Bloom, who, on becoming a modern Gnostic, declared: “I am as old as God.” According to Heidegger, metaphysics “is Dasein’s effort to ground itself…in some supreme being, itself an uncaused cause.” [57] This is an objectifying kind of thought in which the subject establishes itself as the basis of reality…reality becomes merely the subject’s picture.” [58] Metaphysics has no existence.
This understanding of being that is the result of overcoming metaphysics is called “non-conceptual thought….A return to the soil out of which metaphysics grew.” [59] In Heidegger’s What Is Metaphysics, he clarifies the metaphysics implicit in his earlier existentialist analysis. [60] It is not a simple, objective description of human existence in the world. It is human existence devoid of classic metaphysics. When asked if he had changed, Heidegger said truth was the way, not any particular moment on the way. [61]
Just how pagan is existentialism? What is the inner principle of that world view contained in existential philosophy? Is it Christian or pagan?
It is often claimed that it was only the early Heidegger who influenced Bultmann. [62] It is often argued that it was Heidegger’s Being and Time that influenced Bultmann, which came from the period prior to his anti-Christian, pro-Greek polemic-it was a demythologized, existentialist map of existence that Christian theologians believed they could use. [63]
However, Bultmann, himself, did not consider the later Heidegger’s thought as a conversion, “but sees the ‘late’ Heidegger in unbroken continuity with the ‘early’ Heidegger.” [64] Indeed, Heidegger claimed that his work on existentialist analysis was not “for its own sake, but rather in order to awaken new questions as to the meaning of being.” [65] [against Bultmann’s claim to merely using description]. How does this affect Bultmann’s “Christian” theology?
BULTMANN’S VIEW OF GOD
Bultmann’s approach to the NT is uniquely through human experience. That which does not fit the existentialist grid is demythologized. In other words, like Heidegger, he rejects classic Christian metaphysics. If we may call a spade a spade, Bultmann rejects the biblical worldview of God the transcendent Lord, Creator of heaven and earth, and thus stands in some real sense, within so-called “Christian” Gnosticism. Little wonder Bultmann can claim that the difference between the dualisms of Gnosticism and Christianity is that in Gnosticism it is the dualism between the evil created world and the divine soul; in Christianity, it has become “a dualism of decision,” “the decision against the world for God.” [66] Is this finally merely a difference of terminology, thus a distinction without a difference? Otherwise, how could Bultmann compare identification with Christ’s death as analogous to the death of the divinity in the mystery religions (TNT, I, 297), [67] and claim that “the Gnostic view of redemption offered the apostle an equally appropriate form of expression.” [68]
In Faith and Understanding (45), Bultmann denies that God is a being. He talks of God as “Creator” of man, but “not in the sense of a cosmological theory which professes to explain the origin of the world. Rather it is a proposition that concerns man’s existence.” [69] Though Bultmann, in Faith and Understanding (263), argued that liberalism had read the NT through the lens of a “pantheism of history,” where religious meaning is implicit in historical events. Bultmann, it seems, has opted for a “pantheism of existence.” Ridderbos says it well: “Bultmann’s conception is a grandiose attempt to effect a synthesis between the Christian faith and immanence philosophy (the view of life which seeks to find the absolute within the limits or boundaries of the human spirit), here conceived of in its existential form.” [70]
Ridderbos argues that insofar as this affirmation of man as spirit is within man’s own reach, God is entirely superfluous, but he claims that Bultmann is different from existentialism because man is brought to decision through the address of God’s word, thereby “join[ing] the Christian faith to existentialism.” [71] But if Roberts is right, only existentialism is God’s word.
After three hundred and twenty two pages of profound analysis, hailed by Paul Homer, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School as “the most penetrating study of Bultmann that I have read,” Robert Roberts, professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Western Kentucky University. summarizes the whole project of Bultmann as an attempt to reduce the content of Christian theology to a single idea: that of an act or decision in which man draws his self-understanding and thus his self into conformity with his authentic being as potentiality to be. [72] Though aesthetically pleasing, Roberts calls this tour de force “a disaster” for failing to do justice to the Christian faith and thus failing to aid people in their relationship with God. [73] I agree with the judgment of Ladd, who observes: “…Bultmann’s existential interpretation is the contemporary adaptation of the gospel to the prevailing philosophy [of the day],” [74] which, in this case, I would add, was a subtle form of paganism, delivered in the new, beguiling clothes of existentialism.
BULTMANN’S DISCIPLES
Bultmann did his deconstructive work, ridding the Christian faith of genuine transcendence, but James Robinson suggested in an SBL “fireside chat,” that Bultmann did not go far enough. “I would have liked to get involved in the death-of-God controversy…,[I]n demythologizing, Bultmann did not carry through consistently with regard to God talk.” [75]
Robert Funk, in a public lecture at the SBL Meeting in New Orleans, November, 1996, entitled “The Incredible Creed,” argued that Bultmann had not gone far enough, but had hastened the demise of the kerygma because already he did not believe in heaven and hell, good and evil spirits, miracles, eschatology as an event produced by God, divine determination, death as the punishment for sin, the atonement and the resurrection. But Bultmann’s radical stance was attenuated by working within the neo-orthodox confines of the kerygma and the Christ event.
Following Bultmann and Heidegger, Funk states: “The God of the metaphysical age is dead. There is not a personal god out there external to human beings…” Funk, Weststar website. Here you have the model for a consistent carrying through of the demythologization of biblical God talk, which owes much to the Later Heidegger.
NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES AND THE LATER HEIDEGGER
James Robinson wrote in and edited a book in 1963 entitled The Later Heidegger and Theology, [76] in which Robinson can hardly curb his wild enthusiasm for future theologizing. He speaks of the “explosive potentialities of the ‘later Heidegger’ for theology.” [77] Certainly a new wave of Protestant theologians saw in the later Heidegger new possibilities for theology. [78]
These post-Bultmannians went beyond Bultmann, just as Heidegger did. Where Bultmann tried to eliminate the mythic overlay of heavenly messengers and angelic powers, in a sort of closed-system rationalism, the later Heidegger sought to re-instate them. [79] Heidegger demythologizies the Bible and remythologizes the world in the accents of a Greek neomythology. [80] So Heidegger and the later Bultmannians went beyond Bultmann into religious pagan mysticism.
THE LATER HEIDEGGER
Generally, for Heidegger, one can speak of “a shift away from a biblical religion to a certain Greek religion….Heidegger now invokes not no god but new gods…” [81] Heidegger never gave up his commitment to Greek mythology. Heidegger was fascinated by Greece and spoke as much about “the gods” as about “God.” He speaks of “‘the gods [who] are the beckoning messengers of the Godhead,’ in himself incomparable and ineffable.” [82]
“Indeed, the later writings invoke a certain pagan mythic world of mundane gods and divinized cosmic powers.” [83]
After the war, the so-called later Heidegger becomes more mystical and meditative, and returns to Meister Eckhart, who had fascinated him earlier in his life. [84]
In this “religious” phase, he spoke of the possibility of a “coming destiny of Being, of a New Age, a coming Dawn, an Other Beginning, a new dispensation of Being and the Holy in which the last god will…make a new manifestation of the Holy possible.” [85] In 1959 Heidegger said that in his thinking “the door remains open for a non-metaphysical God…” [86]
Barth argued that theology gives priority to God over man, and that Heidegger gave priority to Dasein over being, but, according to Robinson, the later Heidegger gave priority to being. [87] But this is the typical confusion where faith of all kind is ok., where the very nature of being determines everything. It is reflected in John Macquarrie’s judgment: “a holy or sacred reality at the heart of all being [is that which] is central to [Eastern and Western] religion,” not a specific definition of God. [88] In this deep sense, argues Macquarrie, Heidegger is religious.” [This is also the position of Tillich, the third of the triumvirate at Marburg].
John D. Caputo, has a chapter, “Heidegger’s Gods.” Here is his fascinating thesis:
“In the 20s Heidegger took the jewgreek world of biblical Christianity seriously and moved in a demythologizing, ontologizing direction. From the 30s on, Jews and Greeks were shown the door and replaced by a pantheon of “pagan” “gods,” pure Greeks, and celebrated in an openly mythologizing thinking, which culminated in the hope that one day one of them would come along and save us.” [89] “The myth of Being, of Hellas and Germania, was made possible by the exclusion of Semitic myth-not only the myths of creation, fall and redemption, but above all by the myth of justice…and compassion.” [90]
At the same time, Heidegger was deeply religious. He is reputed to have said quite often, noch nur ein Gott kann uns retten-“Only a God can save us.” [91] What kind of God would that be? He agreed with Nietzsche that the God of classical biblical orthodoxy was dead. [92] He said he was neither “an atheist or a theist.” [93] Thus it can be argued, as Casuto does, that “Heidegger’s later writings are more suggestive of a certain Buddhism…than of Judaism and Christianity and the emancipatory power of biblical justice.” [94]
THE DECONSTRUCTION OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES
A powerful wing of Biblical Studies has been committed to the promotion of this Later Heideggerian pagan spirituality, particularly via the rehabilitation of ancient Gnosticism as a valid form of early Christianity. Robinson states that Bultmann’s pupils agree that theology must work with the later Heidegger. [95] Robinson and Koester apply the deconstructive program of their mentor, Rudolf Bultmann, the “demythologization of the New Testament.” Thereby dismantling the theistic understanding of the New Testament. Constructively they propose to fill the void the spirituality of monistic Gnosticism. Despite the vast cultural differences between North American Protestantism and ancient Gnosticism,” says Philip Lee, noted author on this subject, “the parallels between the two . . . can no longer be ignored.” [96] Lee could see that the interest in Gnosticism was not purely historical. As Robinson says about the Nag Hammadi texts: “The focus of this library has much in common with primitive Christianity, with eastern religions, and with holy men of all times, as well as with the more secular equivalents of today, such as the counter-culture movements coming from the 1960’s.” [97]
Why would Bultman’s disciples be so interested in Gnosticism? In 1985, as president of the prestigious Society of Biblical Literature, James M. Robinson issued a programmatic statement for the twenty‑first century. He called upon his fellow Bible scholars to deconstruct their discipline in order to “lay bare [its] . . . biblicistic presuppositions.” The Bible would no longer serve as the ultimate source of authority and as the definition of true Christianity. [98] We were warned. Ever since, Robinson’s agenda has picked up momentum not only because the time was right and his message fitted the mood of the modern world, but also because James M. Robinson and his colleague Helmut Koester of Harvard Divinity School have done seminal work to bring it about. [99] As a measure of Robinson’s importance, Robert Funk of the Jesus Seminar calls him “the Secretary of State of the biblical guild . . . (an) academic counterpart . . . (to) Henry Kissenger.” [100] Both Koester and Robinson are past presidents of the Society of Biblical Literature. Both have been committed to a clearly defined program: “The Dismantling and Reassembling of the Categories of New Testament Scholarship,” as one of Robinson’s articles is entitled. [101] One category they have successfully dismantled is heresy and orthodoxy. [102]
Both separately and together, Koester and Robinson sought to uncover the radical pluralism in the earliest church, causing Christian theology to develop along various trajectories. Orthodoxy was one trajectory, but not the only deposit of the true gospel, making the others heretical. [103] Koester contests that there is not “one gospel” as Paul said, but at least “four.” [104]
James Robinson put content to his manifesto. He founded and is director of the Institute For Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont, California. It is devoted to the rehabilitation of texts and a theology that the early Church denounced as heresy. Within this organization Robinson launched the Coptic Gnostic Library Project, which translates, publishes, and promotes the Gnostic texts. A great service to the scholarly world, it is also a powerful tool for the neo‑Gnostic theological revival. “Secretary of state” is not an exaggeration. Robinson has been the leading force behind the “Q Seminar” (whose importance for the new understanding of Jesus we shall discuss below); an active member of the Jesus Seminar (founded by a colleague, Robert Funk); and director of the Coptic Magical Texts Project, which promotes heretical Gnostic and magic Christianity.
Robinson describes the Church fathers who opposed Gnosticism as “myopic heresy hunters.” The future lies with inclusion. Gnosticism (heresy) and orthodoxy are two trajectories of early Christianity. What was a marginal position just a generation ago is now touted as majority conviction. Robinson encourages modern theology to extract values from both trajectories in order to produce a new formulation of Christianity for today. [105]Robinson’s 1985 manifesto explodes the constraining limits of the orthodox biblical canon. Koester readily admits that this is not value free, objective science. The old liberal historical‑critical method was, he grants, “designed as a hermeneutical tool for the liberation from conservative prejudice and from the power of ecclesiastical and political institutions.” [106] In the same way, future New Testament studies should have as their goal “political and religious renewal… inspired by the search for equality, freedom and justice” in the “comprehensive political perspective” of our modern world. [107]
In November, 1995 at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, victory was declared. Leading New Testament scholars rejoiced that the heretical Gnostic Gospel of Thomas had finally made it into the club, and that now we could disband the club. By club they meant the New Testament canon of Holy Scripture. They were referring to the elevation of Thomas alongside the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These backsliders from Christianity seem to be succeeding where their ancient spiritual cousins failed. In a second century list of New Testament books to be received as canonical, it is stated that the books of the heretical Gnostics have no place in the Bible because one cannot mix “gall with honey.” [108] James Robinson declared the elevation of the noxious Thomas into the life-giving Gospels as “the coming of age of American New Testament scholarship.”
Christianity has been Americanized by infusing Gnosticism into the message of the Bible. In a parallel universe, scholars now speak of the Americanization of Buddhism. “It is something of an article of faith in US Buddhist circles that Americans are improving the traditions-by making [Buddhism] more democratic, more practical, more socially engaged, more [feminized].” [109] The same goals mark this new Bible study. But there is also an aspect of triangulation here, since Marcus Borg’s new vision of Jesus compares him to the Buddha. [110]
Helmut Koester, in the epilogue of a collection of essays in his honor,21 gives his own prospective for future directions of the New Testament field. Early Christianity, he says, is just one of several Hellenistic propaganda religions, competing with others who seriously believed in their god and who also imposed moral standards on their followers. [111]
Only contradictory understandings of the Christian faith can explain the divergent evaluations of Gnosticism we noted above. Orthodox Christianity has always maintained the antithesis separating all expressions of paganism, including “Christian” paganism, from biblical truth. Liberalism has always tried to muddy the waters. Today liberals are claiming that ancient Gnosticism is an alternate, authentic expression of early Christianity. Is this estimation plausible? The early Church fathers said no. Modern liberalism says yes.
What would a modern Gnostic, with no pretensions to Christianity either orthodox or liberal, say? Duncan Greenlees is just such a Gnostic, an adept of the theosophical/occult tradition. His evaluation of Gnosticism is therefore most interesting:
Gnosticism is a system of direct experiential knowledge of God . . . the Soul and the universe; therefore it has no fixed dogmas or creed. . . . In the early centuries of this era, amid a growing Christianity, it took on the form of the Christian faith, while rejecting most of its specific beliefs. Its wording is therefore largely Christian, while its spirit is that of the latest paganism of the West . . . [emphasis mine] [112]
Here is no claim that Gnosticism is a valid though alternate form of Christianity. On this issue modern Gnostics and ancient church fathers agree. Both affirm that Christianity and Gnosticism are different religions, even if they sometimes use common terminology. One religion is pagan humanism, the other divinely revealed truth.
The program of the insertion of pagan religion into Christianity nevertheless is carried through in recent academic publications in order to deliver the real Jesus, the original Christian community and a radical redefinition of the Christian faith.
This has produced what Tom Wright calls:
THE GNOSTIC JESUS
The Gnostic Jesus [113] comes in a number of forms, many directly from the Jesus Seminar: peasant cynic, Jewish teacher, social revolution, apocalyptic prophet, the first feminist, mystical guru. Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar gives us his take on Jesus. His goal is to liberate Jesus “from the scriptural and creedal and experiential prisons in which we have incarcerated him.” This new Jesus is a teacher rather than a divine being, emphasizing forgiveness and freedom over punishment and piety, endorsing “protected recreational sex among consenting adults.” [114]
The approach of Marcus Borg, another fellow of the Seminar is an interesting case study in the nature of this new Gnosticizing quest. In his writings, Borg begins by noting a “major shift,” what he calls “the lessening interest in eschatology and apocalyptic.” This, you remember, was what Schweitzer noted about the liberal 19th century Jesuses. Borg is a man with a mission. He believes his “charismatic” Jesus “radically challenges the flattened sense of reality pervading the modern world view, and much of the mainline church,” in other words, a purely this worldly, social reformer, the result of previous NT critical work!
Borg hails the emergence of new questions-the questions are less specifically Christian, and more global, comparing Jesus to other religious figures; as well as new methods-since past methods were narrowly historical-the new are based on insights from the history of religions, cultural anthropology and the social sciences. [115]
Here is scholarship preparing the bed it intends to lie in, perhaps without even realizing that this is what is going on. For Borg then goes on to underline a new consensus. It is a consensus merely reflecting the limited number of groups that employ them.
A NEW CANON/NO CANON
“The distinctions between canonical and non-canonical, orthodox and heretical are obsolete…One can only speak of a ‘History of Early Christian Literature.'” [116] This again is an example, not of objective history but of theological prejudice that rejects the very notion of canon from the outset. Thus the pluralism and syncretism of today is read into the history of the Early Church.
The essential strategy is to incorporate ancient Gnosticism as a valid expression of early Christianity, and since Nag Hammadi Gnosticism is ascetic, for the general Christian public it is much more palatable form to rehabilitate. This is especially the case of the Gospel of Thomas, considered by left-wing scholarship as close to Q and earlier and more authentic than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Hence the massive attempt to elevate Thomas to Christian canonical status, for once Thomas is “in” the very notion of a theologically coherent canon is forever undermined. [117]
This scholarship grants the gift of existence to a purely hypothetical document Q, as a number of recent titles indicate–The First Gospel, [118] The Lost Gospel [119], and Q Thomas Reader, (hailed on the back cover as “The Earliest Sayings Gospels,”) [120] – as well as to the “Christian” community in which Q was born. On these hypothetical creations hangs a radical interpretation of Jesus as a pagan guru. So much hangs on speculation.
Wenham’s judgment in 1992 is that the Q hypothesis, since “no one knows for certain whether a Q-document ever existed,” is still held as a working hypothesis “but with decreasing confidence.” [121] James Robinson, in the same lecture in which he claims that Q is the most important Christian text we have, admits to the ongoing debate about the Synoptic Problem. [122] William Farmer takes him to task:
“…contra Robinson, would it not be more reasonable to conclude that if the ongoing debate about the Synoptic Problem raises questions about whether “Q” ever existed, which it certainly is doing, should not theologians like Robinson acknowledge the hypothetical character of their reconstruction, and admit that their projects depend upon a premise that may be false, a premise which an increasing number of competent scholars are prepared to say probably is false.” [123]
Already in 1955 A. M. Farrer argued there was no need for Q if Luke used Matthew. Everything that was common was the result of Luke incorporating Matthew into his gospel. [124] The simplicity of this argument has convinced more than one contemporary scholar, [125] one of whom described Farrer’s article as a “firecracker.” [126] Farrer’s argument still sparkles, awaiting a satisfactory refutation. [127]Without Q, the whole reconstruction falls to the ground like a house of cards.
NEW SCRIPTURES/NO SCRIPTURES
Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, recently set up The Weststar Institute, producing a bi‑monthly journal, The Fourth R, and housing Polebridge Press. Polebridge Press has published The Complete Gospels (1992), edited by Robert J. Miller.43 This volume began as a new translation of the Bible, known as the Scholars Version. But since the translators attempted to avoid any overlay of orthodox theology, they refused the limitations of the orthodox canon as well. The implicit message of the title is that the canonical gospels are incomplete, and those who do not think so are biblically illiterate. The canonical gospels are “completed” by apocryphal gospels such as the Infancy Gospel of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, (a text long dismissed by critical scholars as popular folk literature of little theological interest). Also included in this complete canon are number of Gnostic gospels: The Gospel of Thomas, The Apocryphon of James, The Dialogue of the Savior, and The Gospel of Mary, all of which, Miller admits, witness to the blending of Christianity and Gnosticism.
All this is proposed in the name of objective science. Says one of the spokesmen for the Jesus Seminar: “[our work] is not answerable to any church….Our purpose is simply to let the gospels speak, as much as possible, on their own terms…” [128] The only problem with the image is that it is false. There is as much theological commitment here as in any openly religious group. [129] Moreover, the “science” on which the image is based leaves a lot to be desired.
If the science is not convincing, what ideology propels the movement? Notably, it is the “Christian” pagan syncretists who exult at the publication of The Five Gospels. The radical Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, who denies the virgin birth and accepts ordained homosexuals, hails the book as “a probing, penetrating, and deeply spiritual journey into the hearts of the gospels . . . and might well become the means whereby the secularized post‑Christian world discovers its own deepest roots.”79
Feminist rhetoric also avails itself of this new scholarship. Notably absent in the “Jesus seminar” at the RE‑Imagining Conference in 1993, attended by some five hundred participants, was the orthodox, New Testament image of Jesus. The proceedings began with songs to the goddess Sophia, and presenter Dolores S. Williams, a “womanist” theology professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City stated bluntly: “I do not think we need a theory of the atonement at all.” A leader of the seminar, Kwok Pui‑Lan, asked: “Who is this funny God that would sacrifice a lamb?” She went on to explain, in terms that recalled the Gospel of Thomas, that the Chinese do not believe in a God outside the creation, and that the Confucianist tradition emphasized the propensity for good in mankind.84
As we await the new Bible, various mainstream publishers have already entered the market. Harper San Francisco announces the arrival of The World’s Wisdom: Sacred Texts of the World’s Religion, by Philip Novak [1994]. “Virtually a World Bible for an age of intercultural understanding,” says the publisher, the book “presents the world’s most enlightening wisdom.” [130] 92 Penguin Books brings us The Portable World Bible [ed. Robert O. Batlou, 1994] which includes selections from the bibles of the major world religions: the Upanishads and the Bhagavad‑Gita of Hinduism, the Lotus of the True Law and The Tibetan Doctrine from Buddhism, The Gatas from Zoroastrianism, the Koran from Islam, the Li Ki and the Book of Filial Piety from Confucianism, the Tao‑Te King from Taoism, and “substantial selections from the Old and New Testaments” from Judaism and Christianity.
The World Scriptures, a gender and religion inclusive interfaith planetary Bible is part of the brave new world of the Age of Aquarius awaiting us in the third millennium.
APOSTATE SCHOLARS WITH A RELIGIOUS AGENDA
Above we mentioned the claim to objectivity. It is true that the Jesus Seminar prides itself on its objectivity. In the introduction to The Five Gospels Funk argues that, in the aftermath of the Scopes Trial (1925), American biblical scholarship retreated into the closet while the “fundamentalist mentality generated a climate of inquisition that made scholarly judgments dangerous.” [131] “The Christ of the creeds and dogma…can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope.” [132] But thanks to the Enlightenment and the dawn of the Age of Reason, biblical scholarship has nevertheless pioneered in its research to discover the real Jesus behind the “Christian facade of the Christ.” In taking the findings of the Seminar to the public, Funk states: “The public is poorly informed of the assured results of critical scholarship.” [133] He gives a definition of “critical”: “The Fellows of the Seminar are critical scholars. To be a critical scholar means to make empirical, factual evidence…the controlling factor in historical judgments. Non-critical scholars are those who put dogmatic considerations first and insist that factual evidence confirm theological premises.”
Faith in reason is nevertheless qualified. Funk claims that the JESUS Seminar had constantly before it the reminder: “beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.” [134]
Are not all these scholars coldly objective scientists giving us a Jesus liberated from church dogma and irrational faith? Not every member of The Jesus Seminar is an evangelical believer. Indeed, for “objectivity” there are even non-Christian fellows. But a number of the leaders are apostates from Christian orthodoxy.
JAMES M. ROBINSON
Robinson, a fellow of The Jesus Seminar was raised on the Westminster Confession of Faith by his father, the highly respected southern Presbyterian theologian William C. Robinson. “We were soaked in family prayers, bible reading and the recitation of the psalms…I have moved steadily left ever since.” [135] He was an evangelical minister in the old PCUS. Retired Presbyterian Church, US missionary to Brazil, Frederic R. Dinkins tells of his providential meeting with James Robinson in 1946 at a youth camp which turned Dinkins’ life around:
Jim Robinson had just finished Columbia Seminary and was working at the First Church in Hattiesburg…with a very conservative and evangelical pastor, Dr. McIntosh. Late one afternoon, at the Youth Camp, Jim Robinson spent about four hours with me – taking me through the Bible to show me some basic positive Reformed doctrine based on the Scriptures as God’s Word. He taught me and challenged me that I needed to study God’s Word if I was to be a minister….He taught me to rely on God’s Word. [136]
Soon after this encounter Dinkins went to Brazil where he worked for thirty five years. Robinson went to Germany to study under Bultmann. During his successful academic career Robinson has been committed to application and extension of Bultmann’s teaching. [137] From that deeply orthodox beginning, Robinson states, “I have moved steadily to the left ever since.” [138] James Robinson, general editor of The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), and director of the Institute For Antiquity and Christianity and the Coptic Gnostic Library Project excoriates the Church Fathers on whom we have depended for our knowledge of gnosticism until this point. Eight times in the scholarly introduction to this quasi-official English translation, Robinson uses the term “heretic” as in the phrase: “[The Gnostic view of existence] has until now been known almost exclusively through the myopic view of heresy hunters.” [139] This is unusually emotive language in such a scholarly work. Is it science or a desirable, new view of Christianity that drives this scholarship?
MARCUS BORG
Marcus Borg, another fellow of The Jesus Seminar and author of the recent book on Jesus, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time [140] is a deeply religious man. Raised an evangelical Lutheran, he now has discovered a new view of the Spirit and of Jesus. The Jesus he met again for the first time is not the Jesus of scriptural orthodoxy. Says New Testament scholar Borg, “Like Socrates, Jesus was a teacher of a subversive wisdom. Like the Buddha, he had an Enlightenment experience. Like a shaman, he was a healer. Like Gandhi, he protested against a purity system.” [141] Borg is not merely comparing Jesus with elements in the lives of other holy men. Borg is recognizing the validity of other religious traditions. For Borg’s new view of the Spirit, according to a recent study of Borg’s development, is actually “rooted in the pantheism of Huston Smith.” [142] So we need to ask not merely who is Jesus. We need to ask who is Huston Smith.
Huston Smith, born of missionary parents in China, is a well-known expert in comparative religions, deeply committed to monistic spirituality. Significantly associated with New Age and occult Theosophical thinkers, Smith is a sponsor of the Temple of Understanding, a organism of the Theosophical Society devoted to global syncretism which now has the privileged status of a Non-Governmental Organization in the United Nations. Smith was a faculty member with well-known New Ager and Assistant Secretary-General of the U.N., Robert Mueller, the Dalai Lama and Marilyn Ferguson, author of the book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, at an interfaith gathering in Malta in 1985, and in the same year gave a lecture at the Theosophical Society’s “Blavatsky Lodge” in Sydney, Australia on the subject, “Is a New World Religion Coming? [143] Huston Smith believes that there is, by the work of the “spirit” “an invisible geometry…working to shape (the great religious traditions of the world) into a single truth.”
Needless to say, this syncretistic view of the Spirit when employed by Marcus Borg will only consider believable a Jesus-guru who can blend into other religious systems. It will reject as unacceptable and thus unauthentic the exclusive claims of the Jesus of orthodox confession. In his personal testimony Borg states quite honestly: “I do not believe that Christianity is the only way of salvation, or that the Bible is the revealed will of God, or that Jesus was the unique Son of God.” Christianity is only one of many “mediators of the sacred.” [144] One certainly has to respect Borg’s belief system, but it is just that – belief. When one comes “out from fundamentalism,” as Borg has also done, if one is aware of the spiritual domain, and evangelicals are, one goes somewhere else, and it appears one often goes into some form of spiritual pagan monism. Is this why a Seminar member states with touching naivete that it is becoming more and more difficult to imagine a Jesus who reflected on his own death? The reason is because the belief-system of many modern Bible scholars, not the facts of the matter, has changed. So, at the end of the day, when all the science has been paraded, and all the claims of cold dispassionate scholarship touted aloud, one still cannot help but think that The Jesus Seminar is one more ideologically-loaded attempt to serve the revival of pantheistic spirituality in our time. Behind the science lies spiritual apostasy.
The marketing people know where Borg’s work belongs. The Many Paths…Infinite Possibilities…One Spirit Book Club, giving you “resources for your total well-being: spirit, mind and body,” offers selections in “self discovery, yoga, prayer, homeopathy, psychology, Ayurveda, Buddhism, astrology and Christianity.” One of the featured book, along with various titles like Celtic Magic, or The Druid, or An Encyclopaedia of Gods, or The Tarot Handbook or Awakening the Buddha Within is Borg’s Jesus and Buddha.
ROBERT FUNK
Robert Funk is the founder of The Jesus Seminar who is committed to bringing the fruits of his radical critical scholarship to the average Christian in the pew. According to Funk Christians need to mature in their knowledge and realize that most of what Jesus says in the Gospels was placed on his lips by later believers and that most authentic sayings of Jesus come from a hypothetical document, Q, which some scholars believe is embedded in Matthew and Luke, and from the heretical Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. In 1993 Funk published a best-selling book, The Five Gospels, setting this heretical text alongside the four canonical Gospels as an equally valid source for access to Jesus. [145] This is like asking Christ and Belial to share the Sunday morning service. This can only confuse the average Christian and promote the coming of pagan religious syncretism.
According to another Seminar fellow, Marcus Borg, in a taped public debate at the University of Oregon, his colleague Funk has a past as an evangelical fundamentalist that he still is attempting to live down. According to Borg, as a youth, Funk, dressed in a white suit and white shoes was pushed forward as a boy preacher. If anyone knows the hot-house atmosphere of certain milieu where children are used as cute “Christian” performers, one sympathizes with Funk. But escaping “out from fundamentalism,” is anything but a cold objective affair.
Funk has come a long way. He dedicates his book to Galileo “who altered our view of the heavens forever”; to Thomas Jefferson “who took scissors and paste to the gospels”; and to David Friedrich Strauss who “pioneered the quest for the historical Jesus.” [146]
Certainly the great scientist Galileo got an undeserving shaft from the church of his day, but should the work of Jefferson and Strauss on the Bible to be seen as “science” in anywhere near the same sense? Would anyone today accept the subjective Bible-study methods of Jefferson? With regard to Strauss, as a so-called biblical scientist, he is a most complex figure.
Strauss’s biographer documents that though held up as the great example of critical, dispassionate scholarship and the father of scientific research on the historical Jesus, Strauss was in deep fellowship with the occult. [147] Though his father Johann Friedrich Strauss was an orthodox Christian pietist, [148] early in his theological training David immersed himself in the mysticism of Jacob Böhme, in “spiritism, clairvoyance and sopiritual healing,” [149] and came to believe deeply in the supernatural, but “not…in any theistic sense, but rather as a belief in the pantheistic unity of the world.” [150] Strauss himself later recounts a meeting with a medium, the Seeress of Prevorst:
I cannot in my whole life remember such a comparable moment. I was absolutely convinced that as soon as I laid my hand in hers [the medium’s] my whole thinking and being would lie open before her….it was as if someone pulled the ground away from under my feet and I were sinking into a bottomless abyss….she [the medium] praised my faith, and…[said] that I would never fall into unbelief. [151]
According to this seeress, the father of modern New Testament scholarship would always be a believer – in occult pantheism, something Strauss never repudiated. How can someone with such deep religious convictions of a non-Christian nature, antipathetic to orthodoxy, make a believable claim to objectivity when dealing with a theistic document like the New Testament! Monists will always find theism unacceptable. With admirable consistency they will always eliminate any expressions of theism as a possible explanation of phenomena in the life of Jesus. Miracles, unique divine nature, atoning death for sin, God distinct from the creation He made, and inspired Scripture, to name just a few, are all elements intrinsic to a theistic world view which are “objectively” and “scientifically” screened out by monists as later additions to a Jesus they want to make much more amenable to their theology. At the end of the day, such a theological agenda determines from the start what Jesus can and cannot say. Monists can only produce a monistic Jesus. This might be good [monistic] theology but it is not science.
In the above mentioned lecture concerning the critique of Bultmann, Funk stated that we do not need a heavenly redeemer, because Joseph Campbell, amongst others, gives us an “internal redeemer.” Joseph Campbell, guru to George Lucas, one of the spiritual creators of Anakim, the “Balancer,” and Star Wars, [152] was an apostate Roman Catholic and Jungian, who sought wisdom in the pagan myths, and delivered much of it on public television. [153] He describes the calling of every human being, though born in one sex or the other, to transcend duality. This is to be done, as in the ancient mystery religions, by undergoing a series of initiations [or mystical experiences], whereby the individual “realizes that he is both mortal and immortal, male and female.” [154] Campbell was enamored of the goddess story because in it “the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity is not something ruling over and above a fallen nature.” [155] With his predilection for Strauss, Funk has also found the equivalent of Strauss’s seeress in the person of Campbell. Recently Funk and the Jesus Seminar created the Order of D. F. Strauss to honor scholars who excel in this tradition.
If there is a Jesus in the new, liberated world of tomorrow, he will fit all the parameters of this world’s new paganism. The Jesus Seminar will see to that. So much for their objective, neutral position. Stephen Neil and N. T. Wright identify the subjectivity:
Within the study of the history of religions there always tends to be a bias. However much most scholars declare their neutrality, there is always a sense that proving some element of Christianity to be derived from, say, Gnosticism, or Qumran, might have a hidden value-judgment attached to it. Students who fail to see this tend to get tired of the endless arguments about ‘background’: but once the agenda is revealed, the battle can be smelt, and its implications for wider issues all too easily imagined. In scholarship, as in international affairs, fighting often takes place on secondary battlefields, with the superpowers taking an active interest in apparently small-scale local skirmishes. [156]
Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God [157] argues that their view of Jesus “… is a particular view of Jesus, working its way through into a detailed list of sayings that fit with this view.”
A NEW VERSION OF CHRISTIANITY/THE END OF CHRISTIANITY
Here is the real goal. The New Jesus of the Jesus Seminar gives us a new Christianity for the global era. With their new Jesus, the Jesus Seminar feels authorized to address the question of God, with the stated starting point: “It is no longer credible to think that there is a God ‘out there.'” [158]
John Shelby Spong, promoted by the Jesus Seminar‘s Westar Institute, gives us A New Christianity for a New World. Spong’s mentor was J. A. T. Robinson, who popularised Tillich in the English-speaking world, and defended the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. [159] Spong claims that stand helped him take a new view of sexuality, which presently includes him being the religion editor on a pornographic website. [160]
Spong credits Lloyd Geering for creating “an audience for me in New Zealand and Australia.” [161] Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University, considered one of New Zealand’s foremost thinkers, described by Bishop Spong as a “Presbyterian heretic,” [162] Geering takes this moment of human history very seriously, setting tomorrow’s global culture in the context of Western intellectual history. Embraced by the Jesus Seminar, Geering’s books [163] are promoted as programmatic essays for the future earth community-from the point of view of Christian apostasy and pagan orthodoxy.
In other words, this pagan New Testament scholarship finds its “theological” expression in Geering’s radical agenda According to Geering, tomorrow’s culture will be post-Christian, global, and religiously pagan. This agenda is remarkably similar to that found in the ex-Roman Catholic Thomas Berry, The Great Work, which is working its way not simply through biblical texts but through the texts of the UN’s global programs.
TOMORROW’S CULTURE WILL BE POST-CHRISTIAN
This is because evolution proves that human beings, as they evolved, created language, then symbols, then religious explanations. The most recent human religious inventions are the monotheistic divine Creator of all things, and the dualism between the spiritual realm of a God who is believed to really exist, and the realm of created life. Classic Christian theology has called this the Creator/creature distinction. However, according to Geering, “The other-world of the dualistic picture…has been slowly dissolving from Western consciousness…,” not least “through the most serious condemnation of traditional monotheism,…by feminist thought.” [164]
Geering, following Spong, is thus categorical in his rejection of the God of the Bible: “The time for glorifying the Almighty (male) God who supposedly rules is now over.” [165] The end of Christianity is so evident “that some future generation may well be moved to discard the Christian calendar entirely, and rename the year 2000 AD as 1 GE, the first year of the global era. [166] Soon the Lord’s Supper will only signify human fellowship, and Christmas will be a holiday for the celebration of family.
TOMORROW’S CULTURE WILL BE GLOBALThis is because we live at a moment in time where “the process by which all scientific, cultural, religious and economic human activity is being integrated into one worldwide network.” [167] Thus Geering believes “the UN’s time has finally come. It is only within the framework of that global organization that the common problems of mankind can be collectively addressed.” [168] Global consciousness is causing us “to discover and acknowledge both cultural diversity and cultural relativity,” [169] as well as to create “one unified species [through] a global consciousness/super-consciousness.” [170] This possibility leads the analytical intellectual, Geering, to deep expressions of optimistic spirituality, “…possibly the human species,” opines Geering, “…could become so united in love and goodwill that there would be some kind of spiritual center…” [171] Indeed, this possibility becomes a requirement. “If the global society emerges, it will require humanity to develop a new consciousness and a new form of spirituality.” [172] So, what kind of new spirituality will this be?
TOMORROW’S CULTURE WILL BE RELIGIOUSLY PAGAN
This is so because “the new story,” which has become basic to the global world, begins with a new word or idea:…evolution. Geering takes this word “in its broadest sense of change and development from within.” [173] Following the logic of his thoughts, he states unambiguously: “Unlike the dualistic character of the Christian world, the new global world is monistic [italics mine]. That means that the universe is conceived as essentially one…” Of course, this is not new. It is classic spiritual paganism, and Geering, in spite of his all-pervading explanatory principle of evolutionary progress, has to admit with “surprise” that ” the new story has… . “link[s] with the pre-[monotheistic]…nature religions in which the ancients thought of themselves as the children of the earth mother.” In an odd turn of events, contemporary “spiritual” evolution goes backwards! Biblical theism disturbed our evolutionary progress. The clocks have to be put back. As C. S. Lewis said some fifty years ago, noting religious paganism’s perennial character, [he called it ‘pantheism’], and its appearance in Nazi ideology, even as he wrote: “…by a strange irony, each new relapse into this immemorial ‘religion’ is hailed as the last work in novelty and emancipation…so far from being the final refinement, pantheism is, in fact, the permanent natural bent of the human mind.” [174]
Not surprisingly, the same old symbol, Geering believes, will serve for the spanking new future planetary religion. In the religion of the coming global society “Mother Earth would be the a consciously chosen symbol referring to everything about the earth’s eco-system.” He notes that “The loving care of Mother Earth is in many quarters replacing the former sense of obedience to the Heavenly Father.” [175] …In the religion of the coming global society, the forces of nature, the process of evolution and the existence of life itself will be the objects of…veneration.” [176] Again, this is pure paganism, as the New Testament affirms-“worship of the creation rather than the Creator.” [177] These expressions, without surprise, fit naturally “the Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese notions of non-theistic spirituality,” so a coming together of all the pagan religions is on the cards. [178] Sounding like a paragon of tolerance, Geering states: “There will not be ‘only one way’…groups must learn to be inclusive…” [179] In other words, there will only be the “one, inclusive, pagan, way,” and this “must” be the case. This is not tolerance, but a veiled and hence dangerous form of intolerance-but, for the survival of the planet, this is the way it must be!
We are in the presence of a powerful pagan/Gnostic theological agenda, claiming to be spanking new, objective and scientific, but as old as the hills. It is my belief that this trend in biblical studies is part of the setting in place of a pagan reconstruction of human culture for the planetary era.
I close this lecture with a warning that comes from a scholar whose work is independent of my own. Johannes van Oort, Professor of church history and the history of dogma at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, and world expert on Manichean Gnosticism, states a fact and gives a challenge: “…Gnosis in one form or another is expected to become the main expression of secular religion in the new millennium. In order to equip the Church for this new age, the scientific study of Gnosticism is vital.” [180]
Notes
[1] Peter Jones, after teaching the New Testament in Europe and the USA, is now Scholar-in-residence at Westminster Seminary in California and Director of truthXchange (website: truthxchange.com).
[2] I use the terms “Gnosticism” and “paganism” virtually interchangeably, for the following reasons. Paganism is the general religious belief in the divinity of Nature; Gnosticism is a specific and somewhat rarified application of that general belief that becomes associated with the early Christian movement. I thus agree with the early church fathers, who, according to modern scholarship, falsely described Gnosticism as a “relapse in heathenism.” Kurt Rudolf, Gnosis: The Nature and History of An Ancient Religion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1977), 9. Here, Rudolf is implicitly critical of this association. It is, though, the position of very gifted theologians/Church Fathers, such as Hippolytus, who stated that the Gnostics took their doctrine from “the wisdom of the heathen.” [ibid., 14]. Much later in his book [225], Rudolf documents that many Gnostics “fostered a cult of images, owning statues of gods such as those found among the archeological remains of the mystery cults.” See also p. 226 for further evidence. Somewhere, I recall, but I have not been able to trace it, Kurt Rudolf describes Gnosticism as dualism on a monistic background.
[3] J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Eerdmans, 1923), pp.62-63.
[4] See Pearson, 21.
[5] Philo, Leg. All. 3:161, where he speaks of the soul as a “divine fragment.”
[6] See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 42-43, who sees radical dualism as the “cardinal feature” of Gnosticism. For the similarity between later Gnosticism and Philo, see the Nag Hammadi text, On The Origin of The World 117:29-35, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), 173: “Now the first Adam of light is spiritual. He appeared on the first day. The second Adam is soul endowed. He appeared on the sixth day, and is called <Herm>aphrodite<s>.” Bentely Layton, in NAG Hammjadi Codex II, 2-7, vol 2 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), 71, proposes “pneumatikos” and “psykhikos,” which the Coptic clearly indicates. Since these terms are not found in Philo, later Gnosticism must have taken Paul’s terms and read them into a Philonic reading of Genesis. I am indebted to my student, Joshua Smith, for pointing out this reference to Layton.
[7] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 326.
[8] Ibid., 325.
[9] Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, ed. U. Bianchi, Numen vol 12 (Leiden, 1967), 100f. Irenaeus gives proof of this notion, in his ingenious argument against the Gnostic theory of consubstantiality, that is, the confusing of God and the creation. If, he argues, the emitted eon shares the same substance with the emitter, then the limited characteristics of the emitted eon (passability, ignorance) are shared by the emitter (Adv. Haereses II:17, 4-5).
[10] Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, “An Interpretation of Logion 114 in the Gospel of Thomas, Novum Testamentum XXVII(1985), 246. See also H. Rengsdorf, “Urchristliches Kerygma und ‘gnostische’ Interpretation in einigen Sprűchen des Thomasevangelium,” Ugo Bianchi, ed., Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, Numen vol 12 (Leiden, 1967), 567, who sees a reference in the phrase “living spirit” in logion 114 to Paul’s “spirit that gives life,” and wonders if Isis mythology, where Isis becomes a male has influences Egyptian Gnosticism.
[11] This is doubtless a reference to original androgyny, the spiritual state beyond male and female-as a number of scholars propose-see Buckley, 246, and not an expression of Thomas’ male chauvinism, as Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), 49, believed, though later in her book retracted (p. 67).
[12] Jonas, ibid., 328.
[13] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 43. The Gnostics turned the biblical names for God into proper names for inferior, demonic beings.
[14] For Jahweh as a “fool”, see Sophia of Jesus Christ 112:19; 114:14-25; On the Origin of the World 100:5-10, 26-27; Apocalypse of Adam 64:14-16; Apocryphon of John 15-19 cp 21:30; Letter of Peter to Philip 135:16. Texts describing Jahweh cast into hell are Hypostasis of the Archons 95:8ff; On the Origin of the World 103:25; 126:20-30. See also Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, translated by Anthony Alcock (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990),132. Many of the Nag Hammadi texts seek in some way to undermine the teaching of Genesis 1-3, indicating a fundamental antipathy to the biblical notion of creation. According to Elaine Pagels, “‘The Mystery of the Resurrection’: A Gnostic Reading of 1 Corinthians 15,” JBL 93 (1974), 276-288, the Gnostics believed in the resurrection but not the way the church understood it. According to Origen the Gnostics do not believe in the resurrection of this flesh and they consider belief in bodily resurrection the “faith of fools.” (Pagels, 278). This is not simply another approach to the same subject, as Pagels suggests. Since Paul also dismisses Christians who refuse to believe in bodily resurrection as “fools” (15:36), we are clearly confronted again with mutually exclusive world views.
[15] The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 489.
[16] Cited in R. J. Hoffmann, Marcion (Chico, CA.: Scholars Press, 1984), 110-111.
[17] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3:3:4.
[18] Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament: Volume 2: History and Literature of Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 330.
[19] James M. Robinson, “Introduction,” The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 3, 6, 7, 16 and 24. Eight times in this introduction to the critical edition of the Gnostic texts, Robinson describes the anti-Gnostic church fathers this way.
[20] In the volume, published in Koester’s honor, The future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 472.
[21] James M. Robinson, “How My Mind Has changed,” SBL Papers (1984), 481.
[22] David Ferguson, O.P., Bultmann: Outstanding Christian Thinkers Series (Collegeville, MN.: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 95.
[23] John K. Riches, A Century of New Testament Study (Valley forge, PA.: Trinity Press International, 1993), 84, 176.
[24] James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English , 1.
[25] Rudolf, Gnosis, 54.
[26] Jonas, 332.
[27] Jonas, 332.
[28] Jonas, 333.
[29] Jonas, 334.
[30] R. Bultmann, Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, ed. and tr. By Schubert Ogden (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1961), 258ff.
[31] Roberts, 211.
[32] Ladd, 33.
[33] Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 28
[34] Ladd, 39.
[35] Bultmann, TNT I, 191
[36] Schmithals, 63.
[37] Schmithals, 72-3. According to Stanislav Grof Future of Psychology: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 44, citing Riedlinger, 1982), Jean-Paul Satre’s work on existentialism was “deeply influenced by a badly managed and unresolved mescaline session…”
[38] KM, 18ff, see Roberts, 42
[39] KM, 27.
[40] Roberts, 43, fn. 48: “Bult does, of course, have a stake in preserving the possibility of an objective description of “existence” along the lines of Heidegger’s Being and Time.”
[41] Schmithals, 64.
[42] Roberts, 212.
[43] Roberts, 212.
[44] Thiselton, Two Horizons, 227:
[45] Schmithals, 16.
[46] Edward T. Oakes, S.J., “Being and Nazism: The Problem of Martin Heidegger,” The Weekly Standard, (August 3, 1998), 33-35. Oakes is professor of religion at Regis University in Denver, Colorado.
[47] Caputo, 170. Cp. Thomas Berry.
[48] Caputo, 175.
[49] Caputo, 177-178.
[50] See William E. Hughes, “The People versus Martin Heidegger,” First Things (December, 1993)35-36.
[51] Oakes, art. cit., 33, refers to the biography of Heidegger by Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, transl. By Ewald Osers (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998). See especially John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1993), 118ff, and 168ff, who argues that the source of his ethical insensitivity and political blindness arose as Heidegger explained Being from Greek philosophy and its expression in National Socialism, while excluding everything Jewish and Christian, especially the biblical ethics of justice and mercy. See also the statement of Otto Poegoller, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, transl. Dan Margushak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987), 272: “Was it not through a definite orientation of this thought that Heidegger fell-and not merely accidentally-into the proximity of National Socialism without ever truly emerging from this proximity.” Cited by Caputo, ibid., 5.
[52] Robinson, 8.
[53] Robinson, 11.
[54] Robinson, 12.
[55] Caputo, 184, though he is referring particularly, here, to the later Heidegger. “Heidegger’s later writings are more suggestive of a certain Buddhism…than of Judaism and Christianity and the emancipatory power of biblical justice.” More generally, John Macquarrie, Heidegger and Christianity: The Hensley Lectures 1993-1994 (New York: Continuum, 1994), 100, states: “I am inclined to agree…that ‘pantheism accords well with Heidegger’s religious statements.'”
[56] Robinson, 21.
[57] Robinson, 20.
[58] Robinson, 20.
[59] Robinson, 23.
[60] Robinson, ibid., 8.
[61] James M. Robinson, “The German Discussion,” The Later Heidegger and Theology, ed. James Robinson and John B. Cobb. Jr., (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 4.
[62] Schmithals, 15.
[63] Casuto, 173
[64] Schmithals, 15. See also John D. Caputo, 7, who sees the later Heidegger already in the early.
[65] Robinson, The Later Heidegger, 7.
[66] Walter Schmithals, An Introduction to The Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1968), 115, citing Kerygma and Myth, 20.
[67] Schmithtals, 134.
[68] Schmithals, 134. A. H. B. Logan, “At-Onement: The Nature of the Challenge of Gnostic Soteriology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 5 (4. 97), 481-497, Compares Valentinian soteriology with that of Bultmann.
[69] The words of Schmithals, 76.
[70] H. Ridderbos, Bultmann, tr. by David Freeman (Phillipsberg, NJ.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1979), 45
[71] Ridddrbos, 45-6.
[72] See Robert C. Roberts, Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology: A Critical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 323.
[73] Roberts, 324.
[74] Ladd, 40.
[75] James Robinson, “How My Mind Has changed,” SBL Papers (1984), 486.
[76] James M. Robinson, ed., The Later Heidegger and Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
[77] Robinson, The Later Heidegger, 5.
[78] Caputo, 180.
[79] Caputo, 180.
[80] Caputo, 170.
[81] Capuato, 177.
[82] Vortrage und Aufsatze, (Neske, 1954), 177.
[83] Capuato, 180-181. See also Macquarrie, ibid., 105.
[84] Caputo, 179. See also John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). In his later work, Demythologizing Heidegger (1993) Casuto becomes much more critical of this mysticism.
[85] Capuato, 183. MacQuarrie, 98, wonders if the mystics like Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, even Heidegger perceived Being in some “ecstatic flight.” Macquarrie calls him a neo-Platonist.
[86] Robinson, ibid., 5.
[87] Robinson, 34.
[88] MacQuarrie, ibid., 100.
[89] John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1993), 168ff.
[90] Ibid.
[91] John Macquarrie, Heidegger and Christianity: The Hensley Henson Lectures 1993-1994 (New York: Continuum, 1994), 94.
[92] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 332.
[93] MacQuarrie, ibid., 95
[94] Caputo, 184.
[95] Robinson, 63.
[96] Philip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics, (New York : Oxford University Press, 1987), 84.
[97] Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 1.
[98] “How My Mind Has Changed,” 495.
[99] See William Farmer, “The Church’s Stake in the Question of ‘Q’,” Perkins Journal, 39/3 (1986), 10.
[100] Robert Funk, “Three Tributes to James M. Robinson,” Foundations and Facets 5/2 (Sonoma, CA.: Polebridge Press, 1989), 6.
[101] James M. Robinson, Interpretation 25 (January, 1971), 63-77.
[102] A recent attempt to do the same, by one of Koester’s students, is Elaine Pagel’s Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003), which seeks to rehabilitate Gnosticism by the same ideological commitment to religious relativism.
[103]James McConkey Robinson, and Helmut H. Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity, (Philadelphia, Fortress Press 1971).
[104] Helmut H. Koester, “One Jeus and Four Primitive Gospels,” Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968), 203-247.
[105] Robinson, How My Mind Has changed,” 486.
[106] Helmut Koester, The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,1991), 474.
[107] Ibid., 475-476.
[108] The Muratorian Canon, line 67.
[109] Stephen Prothero, “Addition or Subtraction: a review of Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Martin Bauman (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2002),” Buddhadharma (Spring, 2003), 65.
[110] Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
[111] Ibid., 473.
[112] Duncan Greenlees, The Gospel of the Gnostics (Madras, India: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1958), vii.
[113] N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis : Fortress Press, 1996), 73.
[114] Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar has a new book, Honest to Jesus: Jesus For a New Millennium (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). See also, US News and World Report (August 4, 1997), 55.
[115] Marcus Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teaching of Jesus (New York/Toronto: Edwin Mellen, 1984); Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).
[116] So declared Koester, in Trajectories, 270.
[117] See Robert Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 1.
[118] Arland D. Jacobson, The First Gospel: An Introduction to Q (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1992).
[119]. Burton L. Mack (also a member of the Jesus Seminar), The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).
[120] This is another offering by Polebridge Press – John S. Kloppenborg, Marvin W. Meyer, Stephen J. Patterson and Michael G. Steinhauser, Q Thomas Reader (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1990).
[121] Ibid. See also the judgment of Hobbs in 1980: “There is no serenity in the field of the sources of the Gospels, there are no longer `assured results of scholarship…'”
[122] A lecture given at Drew University in 1983, published as “The Sayings of Jesus:Q,” Drew Gateway (Fall, 1983), 26-38, cited in Farmer, “The Church’s Stake,” 15.
[123] Farmer, “The Church’s Stake,” 15. See also S. Petrie, “Q Is Only What You Make It,” Novum Testamentum 3 (1959), cited by Wenham, Redating, 42. See Jones, Gnostic Empire, 105, n.34, where a portion of this article is cited. In 1989 a similar judgment about Q was made by Hobbs, “A Quarter-Century Without Q,” 13: “No reconstruction of Q has gained anything like overwhelming acceptance.”
[124]. A. M. Farrer, “On Dispensing With Q,” Studies In The Gospels, ed. D. E. Nineham (Oxford: University Press, 1955).
[125] M. D. Goulder, a radical critic, nevertheless finds Farrer’s arguments still convincing in 1980. See his “Farrer on Q,” Theology 83 (1980), 190-195, and also his “On Putting Q To the Test,” New Testament Studies 24 (1978), 218-234.
[126] See the article by Edward C. Hobbs, professor of theology at the Graduate Theological Union, and the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California, “A Quarter-Century Without `Q’,” Perkins Journal 33 (Summer, 1980), 10.
[127] Art.cit., 19. In the judgment of Hobbs (in somewhat purple prose): “very few are owed so much by so many as Austin Farrer is owed. He is dead these ten years; the posterity of his work lives after him, to declare his wisdom and to summon his successors to honor him, as in fact we do this day.” William Farmer, “The Church’s Stake,” 16, still cites Farrer’s argument as unanswered in 1986.
[128] Miller, “The Gospels that Did Not Make the Cut,” 15. See also his introduction to The Complete Gospels, xi, where he boasts that the work is “free of ecclesiastical and religious control.” Is Miller naive enough to think that Funk did not bring together a group of scholars with a religious pre-commitment?
[129] The studied attempt at objectivity is undermined by the ideological homogeneity of the Seminar members assembled by Robert Funk, most of whom would doubtless call themselves theological liberals. Beyond that one may well wonder how much these scholars are representative of world-wide New Testament scholarship.
[130] The Five gospels, 1.
[131] Ibid., 2.
[132] Ibid., 34.
[133] Ibid., 5.
[134] James M. Robinson, “How My Mind Has changed,” SBL Papers (1984), 482.
[135] .From a letter to the present author, dated Friday, 25 November, 1994.
[136] Ibid., 481. In recounting his thoughts as a young scholar, choosing between the conservative Oscar Cullmann and the radical Rudolf Bultmann, he states: “…with Cullmann one had nowhere to go, whereas with Bultmann one had the agenda for a meaningful lifetime of research.”
[137] James M. Robinson, “How My Mind Has Changed,” 482.
[138] James Robinson, Nag Hammadi in English, 3.
[139]. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993).
[140] Marcus J. Borg, “Me and Jesus: The Journey Home,” The Fourth R (July/August 1993), 9.
[141]. Scott McKnight, “Who is Jesus: An Introduction to Jesus Studies,” Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Re-invents the Historical Jesus, ed. Michael J. Wilkin and J. P. Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 70, n.22. Professor McKnight here mentions a master’s thesis written under his direction at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School by Dana K. Ostby, “The Historical Jesus and the Supernatural World: A Shift in the Modern Critical Worldview with Special Emphasis on the Writings of Marcus Borg,” 1991, which traces Borg’s theological development.
[142] . Alan Morrison, The Serpent and the Cross: Religious Corruption in an Evil Age (Birmingham, UK: K&M Books, 1994), 568. Huston Smith has published with the Theosophical Publishing House of Wheaton, Illinois [Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Wheaton, Ill: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989)] . Readers will recall that the Theosophical Society was founded towards the end of the nineteenth century by the spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, and later propagated by Annie Besant, and that both women are now considered foremothers of the New Age. An authority on the history of the occult calls the Theosophical Society “the very pillar of the late nineteenth century revival of the occult,” according to James Webb, The Occult Establishment (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1976), 25 and 553.
[143] Borg, “Me and Jesus,” 9.
[144] Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
[145] Ibid., dedication page.
[146] The following information is drawn from Horton Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology (Cambridge: The University Press, 1973).
[147] Ibid., 2.
[148] Ibid., 14.
[149] Ibid., 13.
[150] Strauss’ Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Zeller, 1876-78, cited in Harris, ibid., 16.
[151] George Lucas recognized Campbell as one of his spiritual mentors, and Campbell was a constant guest a the Skywalker Ranch.
[152] In a PBS series, shown in the late 80s. One must not miss the irony of tax-payer money being used to promote a deeply religious, anti-Christian, prosyletizing apology for pagan spirituality.
[153] Joseph Campbell, The Power Of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 58.
[154] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, 121. Interestingly, Jung, whom Campbell followed, was fascinated by the Mother-Goddess cults which he believed expressed the truth about reality-see Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 161-176.
[155] Stephen Neil and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1961-1986. Second edition (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 369.
[156] Jesus and the Victory of God, 33.
[157] The Fourth R (August, 2000), 17.
[158] John A. T. Robinson, “The Mentor Who Shaped My Ministry,” The Fourth R 15/5 (September/October, 2002), 17.
[159] Called The Position.
[160] Ibid.
[161] John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change Or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile (San Francisco: Harper, 1999), xviii.
[162] Lloyd Geering, The World to Come: From Christian Past to Global Future (Polebridge Press, 1999), and Tomorrow’s God: How We Create Our Worlds (Polebridge, 2000).
[163] Geering, Tomorrow’s God, 130.
[164] Geering, Tomorrow’s God, 131.
[165] 107.
[166] 147.
[167] 152. Already the UN seems ready to make reality what is still a theoretical utopia. Kofi Annan urges “a global society for all,” abcnews.go.com (07/02/2001). He believes that “humanity is indivisible” (Insight Mag.com, October 4, 2000), and promises a world without want and without fear.
[168] 102.
[169] 104.
[170] 105. The warning of Roman Catholic philosopher, Thomas Molnar (Utopia, 217), needs to be heard: “…the very idea of planetary unity assumes the existence of a new and mature mankind which is capable of transcending all evils which used to mark the old mankind…[a] ‘new man.'” This, of course, is why utopians like Geering must propose a religious solution, for only from religion can one hope for a transformed humaniaty, which raises the following question: can religious paganism transform fallen mankind?
[171] 149.
[172] 147.
[173] C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: The MacMillan Publishing Company/Collier Books, 1947), 82-3.
[174] 157.
[175] 158.
[176] 157.
[177] Romans 1:25.
[178] See p. 154: “All religious traditions will contribute…and those that can respond most flexibly…to the current challenges are likely to offer the most.”
[179] 160.
[180] Johannes van Oort, “New Light on Christian Gnosis,” Louvain Studies 24 (1999), 26,
Beyond Belief: A “Pagan” Read of Early Church History
October 9, 2003 by Dr. Peter Jones
Influential Bible scholars pour a lot of their intellectual gifts into tearing up the roots of biblical Christianity. This is not new, but in our culture, the effect of “critical” biblical studies is multiplied. A general suspicion of “organized religion” finds confirmation from “the experts.”
Such an expert is Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, recognized scholar, and author of the award–winning Gnostic Gospels (1979). This book convinced many that the early Gnostic heretics (n.a. false or pseudo "gnostics"), who introduced pagan spirituality into the Church, represented a genuine Christian alternative, suppressed by a cold, calculating Church institution. In Beyond Belief (New York: Random House, 2003), Pagels expands this message.
She uses the Postmodern “hermeneutics of suspicion” to interpret early Church History. From this perspective, there are no general truths, only people or groups exercising power over others, hence her interpretive principle that “the winners write history.” Beyond Belief is a “suspicious” look at the development of Christian doctrine in the first four centuries of Church History, arguing that behind every clash of doctrine is a struggle for power. Pagels argues at length that the Gospel of John, written around AD 90–100, is an orthodox tract, written by a power–hungry sect whose intention was to undermine the success of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. John wins and becomes part of the Christian canon. Thomas is banished as poisonous heresy. (For her thesis to stand, Pagels, without ever arguing the case historically, must date Thomas prior to AD 70, much earlier than scholarship has ever allowed.)
Beyond Belief creates the sense that Pagels is the objective observer doing a great favor to inquiring minds by peeling away the blind prejudices of the past. However, as Jesus said about the poor, prejudices are always with us, and Pagels has her fair share of them. She admits to a few:
What is “beyond belief” is that someone as intelligent as Pagels cannot see or will not admit that there is a fundamental divide in religious approaches to God and the world. Paul, whose writings Pagels knows well, identifies the antithesis in Romans 1:25. He writes of two opposing religious systems, one “the truth,” and the other “the lie”; one that worships the Creator and the other that worships the creation. How interesting that the Gnostics themselves, whom Pagels sees as “complementary,” rejected God the Creator and finally cast him into hell!
Though Pagels writes correctly of the doctrinal confusion in the early Church, she argues that theological differences are of little importance, and that Christianity cannot be defined by doctrinal boundaries. By transforming the doctrinal struggles of the early Church into a confusing dish of theological goulash, she claims to bring clarity by showing that the great confessions of the Church are in fact proof that the winners (in this case, male ecclesiastical power–brokers) write history.
I have my own suspicions. In Pagels’ objective “history” many known facts do not fit. Apart from the problem of dates, she also fails to convince us that the early believers were, in any real sense, “power brokers.” Athanasius in defending the two natures of Christ, believed himself to be alone against the world. The Christian martyrs, who died excruciating deaths for the truth of the Gospel, were hardly “winners” (in Pagels’ definition). So my suspicion grows. Beyond Belief has a serious religious agenda: to trivialize orthodoxy’s exclusive claims, to popularize heresy and to promote the rising tide of pagan religious syncretism.
Beyond Belief is destined to be a winner, not only in sales but also in influence on the contemporary culture wars. It belongs to a new, winning team that sees religious truth as pagan oneness. But if writing history is only about power, are we obliged to give serious attention to Pagels’ covert power play for a syncretistic, paganized form of Christianity? On Pagels’ own terms, her book, like the Gospel of John (as she sees it), is a prejudiced tract of religious propaganda for the success of a new kind of ecclesiastical power.
October 9, 2003 by Dr. Peter Jones
Influential Bible scholars pour a lot of their intellectual gifts into tearing up the roots of biblical Christianity. This is not new, but in our culture, the effect of “critical” biblical studies is multiplied. A general suspicion of “organized religion” finds confirmation from “the experts.”
Such an expert is Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, recognized scholar, and author of the award–winning Gnostic Gospels (1979). This book convinced many that the early Gnostic heretics (n.a. false or pseudo "gnostics"), who introduced pagan spirituality into the Church, represented a genuine Christian alternative, suppressed by a cold, calculating Church institution. In Beyond Belief (New York: Random House, 2003), Pagels expands this message.
She uses the Postmodern “hermeneutics of suspicion” to interpret early Church History. From this perspective, there are no general truths, only people or groups exercising power over others, hence her interpretive principle that “the winners write history.” Beyond Belief is a “suspicious” look at the development of Christian doctrine in the first four centuries of Church History, arguing that behind every clash of doctrine is a struggle for power. Pagels argues at length that the Gospel of John, written around AD 90–100, is an orthodox tract, written by a power–hungry sect whose intention was to undermine the success of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. John wins and becomes part of the Christian canon. Thomas is banished as poisonous heresy. (For her thesis to stand, Pagels, without ever arguing the case historically, must date Thomas prior to AD 70, much earlier than scholarship has ever allowed.)
Beyond Belief creates the sense that Pagels is the objective observer doing a great favor to inquiring minds by peeling away the blind prejudices of the past. However, as Jesus said about the poor, prejudices are always with us, and Pagels has her fair share of them. She admits to a few:
- she was once an “evangelical Christian,” a stage she grew out of
- she had a delightful tea at the Zen Center in San Francisco with the Roshi, Richard Baker, and Brother David Steindl–Rast, suggesting her openness to the new spirituality of religious syncretism which these men represent;
- after suffering bereavement, she found a spiritual home in the inclusivist Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York, led by a “woman priest” where she was able to reject the notion that being a Christian was “synonymous with accepting a set of beliefs” such as the Apostles’ Creed;
- she is interested in blending Christianity and Buddhism.
What is “beyond belief” is that someone as intelligent as Pagels cannot see or will not admit that there is a fundamental divide in religious approaches to God and the world. Paul, whose writings Pagels knows well, identifies the antithesis in Romans 1:25. He writes of two opposing religious systems, one “the truth,” and the other “the lie”; one that worships the Creator and the other that worships the creation. How interesting that the Gnostics themselves, whom Pagels sees as “complementary,” rejected God the Creator and finally cast him into hell!
Though Pagels writes correctly of the doctrinal confusion in the early Church, she argues that theological differences are of little importance, and that Christianity cannot be defined by doctrinal boundaries. By transforming the doctrinal struggles of the early Church into a confusing dish of theological goulash, she claims to bring clarity by showing that the great confessions of the Church are in fact proof that the winners (in this case, male ecclesiastical power–brokers) write history.
I have my own suspicions. In Pagels’ objective “history” many known facts do not fit. Apart from the problem of dates, she also fails to convince us that the early believers were, in any real sense, “power brokers.” Athanasius in defending the two natures of Christ, believed himself to be alone against the world. The Christian martyrs, who died excruciating deaths for the truth of the Gospel, were hardly “winners” (in Pagels’ definition). So my suspicion grows. Beyond Belief has a serious religious agenda: to trivialize orthodoxy’s exclusive claims, to popularize heresy and to promote the rising tide of pagan religious syncretism.
Beyond Belief is destined to be a winner, not only in sales but also in influence on the contemporary culture wars. It belongs to a new, winning team that sees religious truth as pagan oneness. But if writing history is only about power, are we obliged to give serious attention to Pagels’ covert power play for a syncretistic, paganized form of Christianity? On Pagels’ own terms, her book, like the Gospel of John (as she sees it), is a prejudiced tract of religious propaganda for the success of a new kind of ecclesiastical power.
On Theosis
Theosis ("deification," "divinization") is the process of a worshiper becoming free of hamartía ("missing the mark"), being united with God, beginning in this life and later consummated in bodily resurrection. For Orthodox Christians, Théōsis (see 2 Pet. 1:4) is salvation. Théōsis assumes that humans from the beginning are made to share in the Life or Nature of the all-Holy Trinity. Therefore, an infant or an adult worshiper is saved from the state of unholiness (hamartía — which is not to be confused with hamártēma “sin”) for participation in the Life (zōé, not simply bíos) of the Trinity — which is everlasting.
This is not to be confused with the heretical (apothéōsis) - "Deification in God’s Essence", which is imparticipable.
Alternative spellings: Theiosis, Theopoiesis
Theosis in Orthodox theology
The statement by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, "The Son of God became man, that we might become god", [the second g is always lowercase since man can never become a God] indicates the concept beautifully. II Peter 1:4 says that we have become " . . . partakers of divine nature." Athanasius amplifies the meaning of this verse when he says theosis is "becoming by grace what God is by nature" (De Incarnatione, I). What would otherwise seem absurd, that fallen, sinful man may become holy as God is holy, has been made possible through Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate. Naturally, the crucial Christian assertion, that God is One, sets an absolute limit on the meaning of theosis - it is not possible for any created being to become, ontologically, God or even another god.
Through theoria, the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, human beings come to know and experience what it means to be fully human (the created image of God); through their communion with Jesus Christ God shares Himself with the human race, in order to conform them to all that God is in knowledge, righteousness and holiness. Theosis also asserts the complete restoration of all people (and of the entire creation), in principle. This is built upon the understanding of the atonement put forward by Irenaeus of Lyons, called "recapitulation."
For many fathers, theosis goes beyond simply restoring people to their state before the Fall of Adam and Eve, teaching that because Christ united the human and divine natures in his person, it is now possible for someone to experience closer fellowship with God than Adam and Eve initially experienced in the Garden of Eden, and that people can become more like God than Adam and Eve were at that time. Some Orthodox theologians go so far as to say that Jesus would have become incarnate for this reason alone, even if Adam and Eve had never sinned.
All of humanity is fully restored to the full potential of humanity because the Son of God took to Himself a human nature to be born of a woman, and takes to Himself also the sufferings due to sin (yet is not Himself a sinful man, and is God unchanged in His being). In Christ, the two natures of God and human are not two persons but one; thus, a union is effected in Christ, between all of humanity and God. So, the holy God and sinful humanity are reconciled in principle, in the one sinless man, Jesus Christ. (See Jesus's prayer as recorded in John 17.)
This reconciliation is made actual through the struggle (podvig in Russian) to conform to the image of Christ. Without the struggle, the praxis, there is no real faith; faith leads to action, without which it is dead. One must unite will, thought and action to God's will, His thoughts and His actions. A person must fashion his life to be a mirror, a true likeness of God. More than that, since God and humanity are more than a similarity in Christ but rather a true union, Christians' lives are more than mere imitation and are rather a union with the life of God Himself: so that, the one who is working out salvation, is united with God working within the penitent both to will and to do that which pleases God. Gregory Palamas affirmed the possibility of humanity's union with God in His energies, while also affirming that because of God's transcendence and utter otherness, it is impossible for any person or other creature to know or to be united with God's essence. Yet through faith we can attain phronema, an understanding of the faith of the Church.
The journey towards theosis includes many forms of praxis. Living in the community of the church and partaking regularly of the sacraments, and especially the Eucharist, is taken for granted. Also important is cultivating "prayer of the heart", and prayer that never ceases, as Paul exhorts the Thessalonians (1 and 2). This unceasing prayer of the heart is a dominant theme in the writings of the Fathers, especially in those collected in the Philokalia.
See also: Desert Fathers, Hesychasm, Maximus the Confessor, Monasticism.
Some Comparative Considerations
Theosis in the Christian West
Although the doctrine of theosis came to be neglected in the Western Church, it was clearly taught in the Roman Catholic tradition as late as the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas, who taught that "full participation in divinity which is humankind's true beatitude and the destiny of human life" (Summa Theologiae 3.1.2).
Some Protestant use of the term "theosis"
In addition to the strong currents of theosis in early and some contemporary Catholic theology, one can find it as a recurring theme within Anglicanism: in Lancelot Andrewes (17th c.), the hymnody of John and Charles Wesley (18th c.), Edward B. Pusey (19th c.), and A. M. Allchin and E. Charles Miller (20th c.). The Finnish school of Lutheranism led by Tuomo Mannermaa argues that Martin Luther's understood justification to mean theosis.
Theosis as a concept is used among Methodists [1] especially in relation to the pietist movement and in the distinctive Protestant doctrine of entire sanctification which teaches, in summary, that it is the Christian's goal, in principle possible to achieve, to live without any sin. In 1311 the Council of Vienne declared this notion, "that man in this present life can acquire so great and such a degree of perfection that he will be rendered inwardly sinless, and that he will not be able to advance farther in grace" (Denziger §471), to be a heresy. Instead of theosis, sanctification, being set apart or made holy, is the term that is used more in Protestant theology. Specifically, progressive sanctification is the term that is used for the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, whereby an individual is made more holy.
The Protestant conceptions of praxis, phronema, ascetical theology, and sacraments are quite different from Catholic and Orthodox understandings, but the use of the term theosis may illustrate a commonality of objective or hope.
Deification in Mormonism
The doctrine of theosis or deification in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints differs significantly from the theosis of Orthodox Christianity. In Mormonism it is usually referred to as exaltation or eternal life. While the primary focus of Mormonism is on the atonement of Jesus Christ, the reason for the atonement is exaltation which goes beyond mere salvation. All men will be saved from sin and death, but only those who are sufficiently obedient and accept the atonement of Jesus Christ before the judgment will be exalted. One popular Mormon quote, coined by the early Mormon "disciple" Lorenzo Snow in 1837, is "As man now is, God once was; As God now is, man may be."[2] The teaching was taught first by Joseph Smith while pointing to John 5:19 of the New Testament, "God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did." (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pp. 345-46).
In the Mormon Book of Moses 1:39 God tells Moses, "this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." In that chapter God shows Moses a vision depicting some of God's vast creations including a vast number of worlds created for other people—a sampling of what God created in the past and what he will continue to do forever. Each world was prepared and peopled by God for the purpose of bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of humankind. By immortality is meant personal resurrection so that each individual can continue to enjoy a perfect, physical body forever. By eternal life is meant becoming like God both in terms of holiness or godliness and in glory. It is commonly believed by members of the Church that, like God, an exalted human being is empowered with the privilege to create worlds and people in an endless process of exalting humankind.
Of all the Mormon doctrines including polygamy, critics generally deem this doctrine the most offensive or even blasphemous. Some Mormons argue that even assuming mainstream Christianity's definition of God's omnipotence and omnibenevolence, not only can God exalt mortal man, but God must do so. The argument is that if God is all-powerful, then God is capable of exalting man, and if God is all-good, then God should or must exalt man. They also point to comments by Christ and Psalmists among others that refer to the Divine nature and potential of humans as children of God. Some Mormons also suggest that discussions of theosis by early Church Fathers show an early belief in the Mormon concept of deification, although they disagree with much of the other theology of the same Church fathers, most notably the doctrine of the Trinity.
The Mormons' belief differs with the Orthodox belief in deification because the Latter-Day Saints believe that the core being of each individual, the "intelligence" which existed before becoming a spirit son or daughter, is uncreated or eternal. Orthodox deification always acknowledges a timeless Creator versus a finite creature who has been glorified by the grace of God. The Mormons are clear promoters of henotheism, and the Church Fathers have absolutely no commonality with their view.
Theosis ("deification," "divinization") is the process of a worshiper becoming free of hamartía ("missing the mark"), being united with God, beginning in this life and later consummated in bodily resurrection. For Orthodox Christians, Théōsis (see 2 Pet. 1:4) is salvation. Théōsis assumes that humans from the beginning are made to share in the Life or Nature of the all-Holy Trinity. Therefore, an infant or an adult worshiper is saved from the state of unholiness (hamartía — which is not to be confused with hamártēma “sin”) for participation in the Life (zōé, not simply bíos) of the Trinity — which is everlasting.
This is not to be confused with the heretical (apothéōsis) - "Deification in God’s Essence", which is imparticipable.
Alternative spellings: Theiosis, Theopoiesis
Theosis in Orthodox theology
The statement by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, "The Son of God became man, that we might become god", [the second g is always lowercase since man can never become a God] indicates the concept beautifully. II Peter 1:4 says that we have become " . . . partakers of divine nature." Athanasius amplifies the meaning of this verse when he says theosis is "becoming by grace what God is by nature" (De Incarnatione, I). What would otherwise seem absurd, that fallen, sinful man may become holy as God is holy, has been made possible through Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate. Naturally, the crucial Christian assertion, that God is One, sets an absolute limit on the meaning of theosis - it is not possible for any created being to become, ontologically, God or even another god.
Through theoria, the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, human beings come to know and experience what it means to be fully human (the created image of God); through their communion with Jesus Christ God shares Himself with the human race, in order to conform them to all that God is in knowledge, righteousness and holiness. Theosis also asserts the complete restoration of all people (and of the entire creation), in principle. This is built upon the understanding of the atonement put forward by Irenaeus of Lyons, called "recapitulation."
For many fathers, theosis goes beyond simply restoring people to their state before the Fall of Adam and Eve, teaching that because Christ united the human and divine natures in his person, it is now possible for someone to experience closer fellowship with God than Adam and Eve initially experienced in the Garden of Eden, and that people can become more like God than Adam and Eve were at that time. Some Orthodox theologians go so far as to say that Jesus would have become incarnate for this reason alone, even if Adam and Eve had never sinned.
All of humanity is fully restored to the full potential of humanity because the Son of God took to Himself a human nature to be born of a woman, and takes to Himself also the sufferings due to sin (yet is not Himself a sinful man, and is God unchanged in His being). In Christ, the two natures of God and human are not two persons but one; thus, a union is effected in Christ, between all of humanity and God. So, the holy God and sinful humanity are reconciled in principle, in the one sinless man, Jesus Christ. (See Jesus's prayer as recorded in John 17.)
This reconciliation is made actual through the struggle (podvig in Russian) to conform to the image of Christ. Without the struggle, the praxis, there is no real faith; faith leads to action, without which it is dead. One must unite will, thought and action to God's will, His thoughts and His actions. A person must fashion his life to be a mirror, a true likeness of God. More than that, since God and humanity are more than a similarity in Christ but rather a true union, Christians' lives are more than mere imitation and are rather a union with the life of God Himself: so that, the one who is working out salvation, is united with God working within the penitent both to will and to do that which pleases God. Gregory Palamas affirmed the possibility of humanity's union with God in His energies, while also affirming that because of God's transcendence and utter otherness, it is impossible for any person or other creature to know or to be united with God's essence. Yet through faith we can attain phronema, an understanding of the faith of the Church.
The journey towards theosis includes many forms of praxis. Living in the community of the church and partaking regularly of the sacraments, and especially the Eucharist, is taken for granted. Also important is cultivating "prayer of the heart", and prayer that never ceases, as Paul exhorts the Thessalonians (1 and 2). This unceasing prayer of the heart is a dominant theme in the writings of the Fathers, especially in those collected in the Philokalia.
See also: Desert Fathers, Hesychasm, Maximus the Confessor, Monasticism.
Some Comparative Considerations
Theosis in the Christian West
Although the doctrine of theosis came to be neglected in the Western Church, it was clearly taught in the Roman Catholic tradition as late as the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas, who taught that "full participation in divinity which is humankind's true beatitude and the destiny of human life" (Summa Theologiae 3.1.2).
Some Protestant use of the term "theosis"
In addition to the strong currents of theosis in early and some contemporary Catholic theology, one can find it as a recurring theme within Anglicanism: in Lancelot Andrewes (17th c.), the hymnody of John and Charles Wesley (18th c.), Edward B. Pusey (19th c.), and A. M. Allchin and E. Charles Miller (20th c.). The Finnish school of Lutheranism led by Tuomo Mannermaa argues that Martin Luther's understood justification to mean theosis.
Theosis as a concept is used among Methodists [1] especially in relation to the pietist movement and in the distinctive Protestant doctrine of entire sanctification which teaches, in summary, that it is the Christian's goal, in principle possible to achieve, to live without any sin. In 1311 the Council of Vienne declared this notion, "that man in this present life can acquire so great and such a degree of perfection that he will be rendered inwardly sinless, and that he will not be able to advance farther in grace" (Denziger §471), to be a heresy. Instead of theosis, sanctification, being set apart or made holy, is the term that is used more in Protestant theology. Specifically, progressive sanctification is the term that is used for the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, whereby an individual is made more holy.
The Protestant conceptions of praxis, phronema, ascetical theology, and sacraments are quite different from Catholic and Orthodox understandings, but the use of the term theosis may illustrate a commonality of objective or hope.
Deification in Mormonism
The doctrine of theosis or deification in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints differs significantly from the theosis of Orthodox Christianity. In Mormonism it is usually referred to as exaltation or eternal life. While the primary focus of Mormonism is on the atonement of Jesus Christ, the reason for the atonement is exaltation which goes beyond mere salvation. All men will be saved from sin and death, but only those who are sufficiently obedient and accept the atonement of Jesus Christ before the judgment will be exalted. One popular Mormon quote, coined by the early Mormon "disciple" Lorenzo Snow in 1837, is "As man now is, God once was; As God now is, man may be."[2] The teaching was taught first by Joseph Smith while pointing to John 5:19 of the New Testament, "God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did." (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pp. 345-46).
In the Mormon Book of Moses 1:39 God tells Moses, "this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." In that chapter God shows Moses a vision depicting some of God's vast creations including a vast number of worlds created for other people—a sampling of what God created in the past and what he will continue to do forever. Each world was prepared and peopled by God for the purpose of bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of humankind. By immortality is meant personal resurrection so that each individual can continue to enjoy a perfect, physical body forever. By eternal life is meant becoming like God both in terms of holiness or godliness and in glory. It is commonly believed by members of the Church that, like God, an exalted human being is empowered with the privilege to create worlds and people in an endless process of exalting humankind.
Of all the Mormon doctrines including polygamy, critics generally deem this doctrine the most offensive or even blasphemous. Some Mormons argue that even assuming mainstream Christianity's definition of God's omnipotence and omnibenevolence, not only can God exalt mortal man, but God must do so. The argument is that if God is all-powerful, then God is capable of exalting man, and if God is all-good, then God should or must exalt man. They also point to comments by Christ and Psalmists among others that refer to the Divine nature and potential of humans as children of God. Some Mormons also suggest that discussions of theosis by early Church Fathers show an early belief in the Mormon concept of deification, although they disagree with much of the other theology of the same Church fathers, most notably the doctrine of the Trinity.
The Mormons' belief differs with the Orthodox belief in deification because the Latter-Day Saints believe that the core being of each individual, the "intelligence" which existed before becoming a spirit son or daughter, is uncreated or eternal. Orthodox deification always acknowledges a timeless Creator versus a finite creature who has been glorified by the grace of God. The Mormons are clear promoters of henotheism, and the Church Fathers have absolutely no commonality with their view.
Catholicos Saint Nersess the Great of the Armenian Apostolic Church (+373)
St. Nersess was an Armenian Catholicos (Patriarch) who lived in the 4th century and was the great-grandson of St. Gregory the Illuminator. His father, Athenogenes, and his uncle, Bab, who were next in line for the succession to the Throne of St. Gregory, were laymen and had no desire to become priests. As professional soldiers, they showed no inclination to spirituality and their worldly behavior convinced the Armenian bishops that neither of them were suitable for the position of chief bishop.
Therefore, the church turned its attention to Nersess, the son of Athenogenes, to assume the position. St. Nersess had spent his youth in Caesarea where he married Sanducht, (presumably the daughter of King Diran) and they had a son, who later became the renowned catholicos , St. Sahag the Parthian, grandfather of St. Vartan Mamigonian. St. Nersess was a courtier and served as chamberlain of King Arshag II.
However, despite his secular background, St. Nersess was a pious Christian. His connection with St. Gregory the Illuminator impressed the royal magnates who held council with the king and they advised the king to persuade St. Nersess to become the spiritual leader of Armenia. A humble man by nature, St. Nersess refused their proposal, feeling unworthy of such an honor. The king dismissed his arguments and insisted that St. Nersess immediately be ordained deacon, then priest, and ultimately chief bishop or Catholicos. He was ordained by Archbishop Eusebius of Caesarea in 353 A.D.
St. Nersess's patriarchate marked a new era in Armenian history. Previously, the Church had been identified, primarily, with royal family and noblemen; St. Nersess now brought the Church into a closer relationship with its people. St. Nersess immediately undertook his duties of chief bishop, renovating old churches, founding new ones, and tending to the spiritual needs of his flock. In the early days of Christianity in Armenia, however, many of the people were not strong in their Christian practices. To that end, St. Nersess held a council of bishops in Ashdishad and introduced a number of reforms regarding divine worship, laws on marriage, and fast days in order to make the beliefs of the church more uniform.
St. Nerses also became known for his concern for moral purity and preserving the sanctity of marriage and family life. He built schools and hospitals, orphanages, shelters for the poor and the lepers, and he urged his people to maintain these institutions. Thus, St. Nersess has been described by many as the founder of Christian charity in Armenia and recognized as the clergyman who established the Church's role as the guardian of the Armenian people in its spiritual, social, and educational aspects.
As a leader, St. Nersess also participated in the political life of his country and was among King Arshag's chief advisors during the period 353-359 A.D. However, King Arshag's adherence to the religious policy (Arianism) of his ally, the Roman emperor, a policy which conflicted with St. Nersess' Christian Orthodox beliefs, necessitated removal of St. Nersess. He was exiled for nine years. When he returned, King Bab, Arshag's son, reigned. The friction between them intensified during the next few years.
The religious differences, as well as St. Nersess's condemnation of King Bab's moral depravity, are cited as reasons for St. Nersess' sudden, untimely death. At the king's order, St. Nersess was poisoned in 373 A.D. He was buried in Til, near the tomb of his great uncle St. Arisdages. A cathedral built over the original grave site was destroyed in the 7th century. While the exact site is unknown, relics were discovered and distributed in the 13th century between the church in Erzinjan and the nearby village of Kee, where the Monastery of Dirashen stood. Another monastery near Til, Chukhdag Hayrabedats, also claimed to have discovered relics of St. Nersess in the second half of the 7th century.
St. Nersess was an Armenian Catholicos (Patriarch) who lived in the 4th century and was the great-grandson of St. Gregory the Illuminator. His father, Athenogenes, and his uncle, Bab, who were next in line for the succession to the Throne of St. Gregory, were laymen and had no desire to become priests. As professional soldiers, they showed no inclination to spirituality and their worldly behavior convinced the Armenian bishops that neither of them were suitable for the position of chief bishop.
Therefore, the church turned its attention to Nersess, the son of Athenogenes, to assume the position. St. Nersess had spent his youth in Caesarea where he married Sanducht, (presumably the daughter of King Diran) and they had a son, who later became the renowned catholicos , St. Sahag the Parthian, grandfather of St. Vartan Mamigonian. St. Nersess was a courtier and served as chamberlain of King Arshag II.
However, despite his secular background, St. Nersess was a pious Christian. His connection with St. Gregory the Illuminator impressed the royal magnates who held council with the king and they advised the king to persuade St. Nersess to become the spiritual leader of Armenia. A humble man by nature, St. Nersess refused their proposal, feeling unworthy of such an honor. The king dismissed his arguments and insisted that St. Nersess immediately be ordained deacon, then priest, and ultimately chief bishop or Catholicos. He was ordained by Archbishop Eusebius of Caesarea in 353 A.D.
St. Nersess's patriarchate marked a new era in Armenian history. Previously, the Church had been identified, primarily, with royal family and noblemen; St. Nersess now brought the Church into a closer relationship with its people. St. Nersess immediately undertook his duties of chief bishop, renovating old churches, founding new ones, and tending to the spiritual needs of his flock. In the early days of Christianity in Armenia, however, many of the people were not strong in their Christian practices. To that end, St. Nersess held a council of bishops in Ashdishad and introduced a number of reforms regarding divine worship, laws on marriage, and fast days in order to make the beliefs of the church more uniform.
St. Nerses also became known for his concern for moral purity and preserving the sanctity of marriage and family life. He built schools and hospitals, orphanages, shelters for the poor and the lepers, and he urged his people to maintain these institutions. Thus, St. Nersess has been described by many as the founder of Christian charity in Armenia and recognized as the clergyman who established the Church's role as the guardian of the Armenian people in its spiritual, social, and educational aspects.
As a leader, St. Nersess also participated in the political life of his country and was among King Arshag's chief advisors during the period 353-359 A.D. However, King Arshag's adherence to the religious policy (Arianism) of his ally, the Roman emperor, a policy which conflicted with St. Nersess' Christian Orthodox beliefs, necessitated removal of St. Nersess. He was exiled for nine years. When he returned, King Bab, Arshag's son, reigned. The friction between them intensified during the next few years.
The religious differences, as well as St. Nersess's condemnation of King Bab's moral depravity, are cited as reasons for St. Nersess' sudden, untimely death. At the king's order, St. Nersess was poisoned in 373 A.D. He was buried in Til, near the tomb of his great uncle St. Arisdages. A cathedral built over the original grave site was destroyed in the 7th century. While the exact site is unknown, relics were discovered and distributed in the 13th century between the church in Erzinjan and the nearby village of Kee, where the Monastery of Dirashen stood. Another monastery near Til, Chukhdag Hayrabedats, also claimed to have discovered relics of St. Nersess in the second half of the 7th century.
Fr. Alexis Toth, Bishop John Ireland, and the Grace of Reconciliation
The history of the "two lungs" of the Catholic Church in the United States has been marked, at times, by acrimony, misunderstanding, and controversy.
May 18, 2016
By Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D.
Christ, before his Passion, said to his apostles, “My soul is sorrowful even to death.”1 He was about to enter the garden to pray, and his disciples would soon fall asleep, flee him, and become divided. Christ’s agony in the garden envisaged the entire history of the Church; perhaps one of the Church’s most enduring traditions, unfortunately, has been division. William Blake (1757-1827) once wrote that, “It is easier to forgive an enemy than a friend.”
One of the more ill-fated examples of division in the Church is the antagonism between the Eastern Catholic priest, Father Alexis Toth (1853-1909), and the Roman Catholic bishop of Minneapolis, John Ireland (1838-1918). According to several sources, when Toth and Ireland met on December 18, 1889, their brief exchange planted seeds that matured into an intra-ecclesial antipathy resulting in the departure of thousands of Catholics into Eastern Orthodoxy. Toth recalled that after handing the bishop his papers:
[N]o sooner did he read that I was a “Uniate” than his hands began to shake . . . .
“Have you a wife?” “No.”
“But you had one?” “Yes, I am a widower.”
At this he threw the paper on the table and loudly exclaimed, “I have already written to Rome protesting against this kind of priest being sent to me!”
“What kind of priest do you mean?” “Your kind.”
“I am a Catholic priest in the Greek Rite, I am a Uniate. I was ordained by a lawful Catholic bishop.”
“I do not consider you or this bishop of yours Catholic.”
After Toth had returned from his audience with the bishop, Ireland directed a local Polish Latin Rite priest to “denounce Toth from the pulpit” and published a decree summoning all Catholics to renounce Father Toth.4 Ireland was not acting alone; many of his fellow bishops in America shared his interest in expurgating Greek Catholics, and their married priests, from the United States.
Not only did this encounter precipitate the exodus of many Greek Catholics, but Father Toth’s long friendship with his fellow Ruthenian priest, Father Nicephor Channath (d. 1899), was likewise strained. The story of Toth and Channath is, in the end, perhaps the most hopeful spark of Christian charity and reconciliation that emerges from the tragic incidents that transpired after Toth and Ireland set the stage for decades of disputation and division between Western and Eastern Rite Catholics in America.
Meeting of Greek Catholic Priests in the US. October 1890. Fr. Alexis Toth is front row, third from the left. (Photo: from Fr. Ivan Kaszczak; it appears in his book, "Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Establishment of the Ukrainian Cathlolic Church in the United States", p 24.)
A Landscape of Misunderstanding
The clash between Father Toth and Bishop Ireland was nourished on a landscape fertile for conflict. Latin and Greek Catholics have endured an uneasy rapport, and several factors contributed to this tension. As historian Bodhan Procko outlines the situation of the early Ruthenian priests coming to America, the first problem was “the lack of any official status for the Byzantine Rite in the United States and the absence of any church organization.”5 These priests arrived from their native country with rights of jurisdiction from their ordinaries back home, but once in America they served communities independent of one another and within the territories of Latin bishops who were either unaware of their activities or unwilling to accept their presence within their dioceses. Procko notes that “the majority of Latin hierarchy and clergy in the United States were unfamiliar with the usages of the Byzantine Rite.”6 Ignorance and territorialism were the antecedents of fear and conflict. With pressures from the American Latin bishops, Rome decreed that Byzantine Rite priests who arrived in America must report to the Roman Catholic bishops and operate under their supervision, and more significantly, they were required to be celibate; in addition; those priests who were married were required to return to Europe along with their families.
Numerous instances reveal that when Eastern Rite priests arrived in the United States, they were not well received by their Latin Rite contemporaries, and it was clear that the discipline of clerical celibacy was the main reason for the hostility displayed by Roman Catholic clergy. When Father Ivan Wolansky, a Greek Catholic priest from the western Ukrainian city of Lviv reached America on December 10, 1884, he was given a cold reception. Wolansky was sent to attend to the spiritual care of a growing number of Greek Catholic families who had immigrated to the US, and who felt out of place in the very foreign environment of the Roman Mass, bereft of the richly polychromatic beauty of Eastern iconography and the vacillating exultant and lugubrious melodies of Ruthenian liturgical chant.
What the Latin priests and bishops could not imagine was that their anti-Eastern prejudices deprived these immigrants not only of their long-hallowed form of worshiping God, but also their sense of cultural identity. Father Wolansky petitioned for an audience with the archbishop of Philadelphia, the Most Reverend Patrick J. Ryan (1831-1911), who disregarded his request. Ivan Kaszczak recounts that “the Archbishop’s Vicar General, Very Reverend Maurice A. Walsh (1832-1888), informed Wolansky that the Archbishop would not be seeing him – and furthermore, that there was no room for a married priest in the United States.”7 The disappointed and disheartened Father Wolansky sent a telegraph to his bishop back in Lviv, whose support could still not garner the acceptance of Philadelphia’s Latin Rite hierarchy and clergy. A painful chapter of Eastern and Western Catholic antagonism was underway.
In January 1915, a Roman Catholic author under the nom de plume “Foraneus” published a scornful protest against Ruthenian Greek Catholics in the American Ecclesiastical Review entitled “Some Thoughts on the Ruthenian Question in the United States and Canada”. That acidic essay was published more than twenty-five years after Alexis Toth’s unpleasant encounter with Bishop Ireland, and tensions between Western and Eastern Rite Catholics had only grown more acrimonious. Foraneus first complains that when Greek Catholics came to America, Latin Rite bishops were confronted with the awkward question of jurisdiction; he states that “from the days of the Apostles, there is only one bishop for every district,” a point that is manifestly contentious.8 The Church’s long history has seen Eastern and Western dioceses (called an “eparchy” in the Eastern Church) coexist and overlap in the same territory. Today in Chicago, for example, the city contains the cathedral of the Roman Catholic archbishop of the archdiocese of Chicago and the cathedral of the Eparchy of Chicago of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, each with equal authority to govern the Catholics of their own Rite within the same territory. Perhaps the most bellicose remark in Foraneus’ article is the comment:
Compared with the Latin rite, the Byzantine is and always will be in a state of inferiority. The Latin is universal, since it comprises many nationalities, none of which can claim the language of the sacred ceremonies as its own. Religion being for all, and the same for all, it would be lowered by being dragged down to the level of a merely national concern. The Latin language brings this to memory.9
Byzantine Catholics “always will be in a state of inferiority,” he argues, because the Latin language is a unifier of all cultures and nationalities. “It would seem,” he insists, “that the practice of the ‘West’ is more in accordance with the general principles of Christianity,” than the East.10 The opinions expressed in Foraneus’ hostile essay largely represented an American view, a view that was not shared by most Catholics in Europe, and certainly not shared by the Successors of St. Peter in Rome.
Bishop John Ireland (Photo: Spokane Catholic Diocese Archive)As can be expected, Ruthenian Catholic clergy by the turn of the century reacted with “a basically anti-Vatican movement that reached its peak in 1902.”
They were not interested in denouncing their communion with Rome, but they were deeply exasperated by what they perceived to be a lack of hierarchical support coming from the Vatican. Aware of the frictions between Eastern and Western Rite Catholics in America at that time, Bishop Andrei Sheptytsky (1865-1944), the Metropolitan Archbishop of Lviv, turned his attention across the globe to encourage Greek Catholics in the United States to, as Kaszczak notes, “preserve their union with Rome.”12 Proponents of this Eastern Catholic movement promulgated reactionary accusations against America’s Roman Catholic hierarchy, openly suggesting that that Latin Rite bishops had mistreated the Greek Catholics in their dioceses. In 1902, Metropolitan Sheptytsky attempted to “curb this rising anti-Vatican sentiment by issuing a pastoral letter . . . criticizing the ‘radical priests’ both for their actions and their anti-Roman views.”13 This created internal disputes between Greek Catholics, though despite these tensions the Eastern Rite Catholic population continued to swell.
By early 1904, America had ninety-five Byzantine Rite churches, mostly located in the Eastern and Midwestern states; Pennsylvania had the most, with fifty-seven parishes, and Ohio followed next with ten.14 These parishes were pastored almost entirely by priests from the Old Country: forty-seven were from Hungary, eighteen were from Galicia, and only two were from the United States.15 It is fair to admit that Eastern Rite Catholics at the turn of the century had largely formed into ethnic enclaves, though this was not uncommon of all immigrant communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even of Latin Rite Catholics.
Wilkes-Barre and the Formation of Factions
Added to this mix of tensions between Latin and Greek Rite Catholics was an ongoing conflict within the Byzantine clergy. On October 29, 1890, the first gathering of Ruthenian priests was convened at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to consider how navigate the dominantly Latin Rite Catholic setting they had immigrated into. At the meeting were nine Greek Catholic priests, who collectively decided to petition the Church authorities in Rome for the appointment of a Vicar General to oversee all Byzantine Rite Catholics in the United States.16 In December of the following year, Ruthenian clergy gathered again and wrote a formal document to submit to the Apostolic Delegate on behalf of all Greek Catholics in America, and the intermediary between the Ruthenian clergy and the pope’s representative was Father Nicephor Channath, the close personal friend of Father Alexis Toth. Channath was not only expected to deliver the petition to the Apostolic Deligate, but he was additionally commissioned to function as the Greek Catholic intermediary between the Eastern Rite priests and the Latin bishops. Channath continued in this role until 1896, but he still could not curb the tide of factionalism between Greek Catholic priests who had divided into the radical anti-Rome group and the more moderate faction that still desired to maintain a peaceful accord with the Western Rite bishops.17
Perhaps the most notorious result of these factions was the conflict, mentioned above, between Bishop Ireland and Father Toth and Toth’s conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church; much ink is still spilled over this incident. From the Eastern Orthodox point of view, Toth’s conversion is described as a “return” to Orthodoxy, and from the Catholic point of view Toth’s fateful decision was an act of “disobedience” and a break from the authentic “Church founded by Christ.”18 Whatever the interpretation, as Procko puts it, Toth “became an energetic advocate of the Russian Orthodox Church among the Ruthenians in America and a bitter opponent of Catholicism.”19 By 1901, Alexis Toth had succeeded in converting thirteen Ruthenian Catholic congregations to Orthodoxy, causing nearly 7,000 Greek Catholics to become Eastern Orthodox.20 In the end, “Alexis Toth led fifteen Byzantine Catholic parishes with more than 20,000 faithful into the fold of the Russian Orthodox Church.”21
So successful was Toth in influencing Greek Catholic to become Orthodox that on May 24, 1994, he was canonized (glorified) a saint by the Orthodox Church in America.22 Needless to say, Alexis Toth, who had become an evangelist for Eastern Orthodoxy, and his close friend, Nicephor Channath, who was a tireless supporter of communion with the Successor of Saint Peter, had become bitterly estranged. By 1907, the pope was aware of the turbulent situation in America between Latin and Greek Catholics, and he had settled upon a possible resolution. During that year, Pope St. Pius X (1835-1914) appointed Monsignor Soter Ortynsky, OSBM (1866-1916) the first Eastern Rite bishop of America. Despite Ortynsky’s tireless efforts to reign in tensions between Eastern and Western Rite Catholics, and the sustained conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy, conflicts and conversions continued during his life in America.
One event, however, shines through the shadows of this era with a light of Christian charity and reconciliation; Fathers Alexis Toth and Nicephor Channath were at last able to set aside their ecclesiological disagreements and embrace, at least in their hearts, the Christian unity called for by Christ.
Alexis Toth and the Grace of Reconciliation
On December 30, 1898, Father Channath lay dying on his hospital bed in Lackawanna Hospital in Scranton, Ohio. As he was nearing death, he agonized over the rupture between himself and his beloved friend, Father Alexis Toth. By then Toth was a Russian Orthodox priest, deeply despised by many Greek Catholic clergy, and seemingly unapproachable. Channath could not bear to die unreconciled to his friend and so summoned two Latin Rite Catholic priests to his hospital room and asked them an urgent favor. As the end advanced, the barriers and bereavements precipitated by cultural and ecclesiological difference faded in light of the grace of friendship and reconciliation, and when Father Toth received the two emissaries from his old companion his heart was softened. The next day, Nicephor Channath passed beyond the veil, and George Eliot’s (née Mary Evans, 1819-1890) remark that, “It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much,”23 seemed preferable to the spiritual malady of resentment. On the day of Channath’s funeral Liturgy, January 2, 1899, Father Alexis Toth sent a wreath of flowers to the body of his friend as an expression of his grief and reconciliation. Their love for each other as brothers in Jesus Christ had been restored, although the manager of the funeral home refused the flowers.24
When Toth learned that his wreath was refused, he issued a response in the Ukrainian periodical, Svoboda. Toth was deeply afflicted by this refusal, and recalled that Channath had sent the two Latin Rite priests to offer and seek forgiveness for the “unpleasantries” exchanged between the two friends. Toth wrote: “This was said in a Christian manner and I as a Christian and as a priest, touched to the depth of my heart, replied. . . . ‘I forgive all and remember no injury’.”25 In their supreme act of Christian charity and friendship, Nicephor Channath and Alexis Toth illustrated the grace of Christian reconciliation, despite the divisions that persisted between Toth’s followers and the Eastern Rite clergy in America who remained in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Reconciliation between Latin and Eastern Rite Catholics was more difficult to come by, and it was not until the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II (1920-2005) that conditions between these two Churches began to genuinely improve.
Perhaps it was the fact that John Paul II’s mother was a Byzantine Rite Catholic that made him especially sensitive to the situation of Eastern Rite faithful; he was known to have deeply esteemed the richness of the Byzantine Liturgy. On May 2, 1995, the pope issued an encyclical entitled Orientale Lumen, or “Light of the East,” in which he recognized the difficulties of being an Eastern Rite believer in a predominantly Western Rite Church. He wrote that a “conversion is . . . required of the Latin Church, that she may respect and fully appreciate the dignity of Eastern Christians, and accept gratefully the spiritual treasures of which the Eastern Catholic Churches are the bearers, to the benefit of the entire catholic communion.”26
Not only did Pope John Paul II call Latin Rite Catholics to a “conversion” of heart toward their Eastern Rite brothers and sisters, but he also reminded all Catholics in communion of the Bishop of Rome that the Christian East is essential to the “full realization of the Church’s universality.”27 He also acknowledges how the Eastern Catholic Churches can enrich the spiritual experience of the Western Church, asserting: “Indeed, in comparison to any other culture, the Christian East has a unique and privileged role as the original setting where the Church was born.”28 While the Liturgy, spirituality, and theology of the Eastern Rites might at first appear foreign to many Latin Rite Catholics, these differences are part of what makes Catholicism truly catholic (universal), and they provide a window into how Christians have worshiped in the East for nearly two millennia.
And regarding the tensions that have plagued East and West for centuries caused by disagreements over the discipline of priestly celibacy, several Popes have tried, almost in vane, to calm the storm of controversy. When addressing this issue, Pope Paul VI (1897-1978) insisted that in the East there has never been a debate over the fact that some priests are celibate and some are married; married clergy is part of the East’s tradition. As Paul VI put it, that Eastern priests can be married “is due to the different historical background of that most noble part of the Church, a situation which the Holy Spirit has providentially and supernaturally influenced." In reality, the different views of priestly celibacy is not merely a matter of discipline; they are a matter “providentially” ordained by the Holy Spirit. This view was again asserted on June 14, 2014, when Pope Francis ratified the “Pontifical Precepts About Married Eastern Clergy,” and declared that married Eastern clergy have full rights to practice their ministry in all territories of the Church, even those places “outside the traditional Eastern territory.”
Perhaps the history of Eastern Rite Catholics in the United States would have unfolded in an entirely different fashion had Bishop Ireland and Father Alexis Toth met under the conditions outlined by Popes John Paul II, Paul VI, and Francis, but we can nonetheless be grateful for the improved atmosphere today between the “two lungs of the Church,” as John Paul II referred to the Eastern and Western parts of the Catholic Church. Today this relationship is marked by a spirit of collaboration, better understanding, and appreciation between the Churches, and the example of reconciliation between Alexis Toth and Nicephor Channath continues to bear fruit as past prejudices are slowly set aside to better realize the work that Christ has commissioned all his followers to accomplish.
Endnotes:
1 Matt 26: 38 (NAB).
2 William Blake, “Jerusalem,” in The Poetical Works of William Blake, Viol. 2, Edwin J. Ellis, ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1906), 453.
3 This dialogue is quoted in D. Oliver Herbel, Turning Toward Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 25. See Kieth S. Russin, “Father Alexis G. Toth and the Wilkes-Barre Litigations,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 3 (1972): 132-133.
4 Herbel, Turning Toward Tradition, 32. Also see Marvin R. O’Connell, John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988), 269-271.
5 Bodhan P. Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia: A History of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the U.S.A.” (PhD diss, University of Ottawa, 1963), 34.
6 Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia,” 34.
7 Ivan Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Establishment of the Ukrainian Cathlolic Church in the United States (Toronto, CA: The Basilian Press, 2013), 18.
8 Foraneus, “Some Thoughts on the Ruthenian Question in the United States and Canada,” Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 52 (January 1915), 43.
9 Foraneus, “Some Thoughts on the Ruthenian Question,” 46.
10 Foraneus, “Some Thoughts on the Ruthenian Question,” 46.
11 Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, 33.
12 Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, 33.
13 Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, 35.
14 Kalendar Greko Kaftoliceskaho Soedinenija (Munhall-Homestead, PA: Greek Catholic Union, 1905), 160.
15 Kalendar Greko Kaftoliceskaho Soedinenija, 160.
16 H. J. Heuser, “Greek Catholics and Latin Priests,” American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 9 (March 1891): 198.
17 Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia,” 38.
18 See Herbel, Turning Toward Tradition, 37; Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia,” 41; and Declaration Dominus Jesus, no. 16.
19 Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia,” 41.
20 Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia,” 42.
21 Athanasius B. Pekar, OSBM, Our Past and Present: Historical Outlines of the Byzantine Ruthenian Metropolitan Province (Pittsburgh: Byzantine Seminary Press, 1974), 39-40.
22 Herbel, Turning Toward Tradition, 11.
23 George Eliot, The Works of George Eliot, Vol. 7, Middlemarch (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1901), 359.
24 See Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, 25.
25 Svoboda, 26 January 1899. In Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, 26.
26 Pope John Paul II, Orientale Lumen, No. 21.
27 Pope John Paul II, Orientale Lumen, No. 21.
28 Pope John Paul II, Orientale Lumen, No. 5.
29 Pope Paul VI, On Priestly Celibacy, No. 38.
30 Pontificia Praecepta de Clero Uxorato Orientaali (Pontifical Precepts About Married Eastern Clergy), 14 June 2014.
The history of the "two lungs" of the Catholic Church in the United States has been marked, at times, by acrimony, misunderstanding, and controversy.
May 18, 2016
By Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D.
Christ, before his Passion, said to his apostles, “My soul is sorrowful even to death.”1 He was about to enter the garden to pray, and his disciples would soon fall asleep, flee him, and become divided. Christ’s agony in the garden envisaged the entire history of the Church; perhaps one of the Church’s most enduring traditions, unfortunately, has been division. William Blake (1757-1827) once wrote that, “It is easier to forgive an enemy than a friend.”
One of the more ill-fated examples of division in the Church is the antagonism between the Eastern Catholic priest, Father Alexis Toth (1853-1909), and the Roman Catholic bishop of Minneapolis, John Ireland (1838-1918). According to several sources, when Toth and Ireland met on December 18, 1889, their brief exchange planted seeds that matured into an intra-ecclesial antipathy resulting in the departure of thousands of Catholics into Eastern Orthodoxy. Toth recalled that after handing the bishop his papers:
[N]o sooner did he read that I was a “Uniate” than his hands began to shake . . . .
“Have you a wife?” “No.”
“But you had one?” “Yes, I am a widower.”
At this he threw the paper on the table and loudly exclaimed, “I have already written to Rome protesting against this kind of priest being sent to me!”
“What kind of priest do you mean?” “Your kind.”
“I am a Catholic priest in the Greek Rite, I am a Uniate. I was ordained by a lawful Catholic bishop.”
“I do not consider you or this bishop of yours Catholic.”
After Toth had returned from his audience with the bishop, Ireland directed a local Polish Latin Rite priest to “denounce Toth from the pulpit” and published a decree summoning all Catholics to renounce Father Toth.4 Ireland was not acting alone; many of his fellow bishops in America shared his interest in expurgating Greek Catholics, and their married priests, from the United States.
Not only did this encounter precipitate the exodus of many Greek Catholics, but Father Toth’s long friendship with his fellow Ruthenian priest, Father Nicephor Channath (d. 1899), was likewise strained. The story of Toth and Channath is, in the end, perhaps the most hopeful spark of Christian charity and reconciliation that emerges from the tragic incidents that transpired after Toth and Ireland set the stage for decades of disputation and division between Western and Eastern Rite Catholics in America.
Meeting of Greek Catholic Priests in the US. October 1890. Fr. Alexis Toth is front row, third from the left. (Photo: from Fr. Ivan Kaszczak; it appears in his book, "Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Establishment of the Ukrainian Cathlolic Church in the United States", p 24.)
A Landscape of Misunderstanding
The clash between Father Toth and Bishop Ireland was nourished on a landscape fertile for conflict. Latin and Greek Catholics have endured an uneasy rapport, and several factors contributed to this tension. As historian Bodhan Procko outlines the situation of the early Ruthenian priests coming to America, the first problem was “the lack of any official status for the Byzantine Rite in the United States and the absence of any church organization.”5 These priests arrived from their native country with rights of jurisdiction from their ordinaries back home, but once in America they served communities independent of one another and within the territories of Latin bishops who were either unaware of their activities or unwilling to accept their presence within their dioceses. Procko notes that “the majority of Latin hierarchy and clergy in the United States were unfamiliar with the usages of the Byzantine Rite.”6 Ignorance and territorialism were the antecedents of fear and conflict. With pressures from the American Latin bishops, Rome decreed that Byzantine Rite priests who arrived in America must report to the Roman Catholic bishops and operate under their supervision, and more significantly, they were required to be celibate; in addition; those priests who were married were required to return to Europe along with their families.
Numerous instances reveal that when Eastern Rite priests arrived in the United States, they were not well received by their Latin Rite contemporaries, and it was clear that the discipline of clerical celibacy was the main reason for the hostility displayed by Roman Catholic clergy. When Father Ivan Wolansky, a Greek Catholic priest from the western Ukrainian city of Lviv reached America on December 10, 1884, he was given a cold reception. Wolansky was sent to attend to the spiritual care of a growing number of Greek Catholic families who had immigrated to the US, and who felt out of place in the very foreign environment of the Roman Mass, bereft of the richly polychromatic beauty of Eastern iconography and the vacillating exultant and lugubrious melodies of Ruthenian liturgical chant.
What the Latin priests and bishops could not imagine was that their anti-Eastern prejudices deprived these immigrants not only of their long-hallowed form of worshiping God, but also their sense of cultural identity. Father Wolansky petitioned for an audience with the archbishop of Philadelphia, the Most Reverend Patrick J. Ryan (1831-1911), who disregarded his request. Ivan Kaszczak recounts that “the Archbishop’s Vicar General, Very Reverend Maurice A. Walsh (1832-1888), informed Wolansky that the Archbishop would not be seeing him – and furthermore, that there was no room for a married priest in the United States.”7 The disappointed and disheartened Father Wolansky sent a telegraph to his bishop back in Lviv, whose support could still not garner the acceptance of Philadelphia’s Latin Rite hierarchy and clergy. A painful chapter of Eastern and Western Catholic antagonism was underway.
In January 1915, a Roman Catholic author under the nom de plume “Foraneus” published a scornful protest against Ruthenian Greek Catholics in the American Ecclesiastical Review entitled “Some Thoughts on the Ruthenian Question in the United States and Canada”. That acidic essay was published more than twenty-five years after Alexis Toth’s unpleasant encounter with Bishop Ireland, and tensions between Western and Eastern Rite Catholics had only grown more acrimonious. Foraneus first complains that when Greek Catholics came to America, Latin Rite bishops were confronted with the awkward question of jurisdiction; he states that “from the days of the Apostles, there is only one bishop for every district,” a point that is manifestly contentious.8 The Church’s long history has seen Eastern and Western dioceses (called an “eparchy” in the Eastern Church) coexist and overlap in the same territory. Today in Chicago, for example, the city contains the cathedral of the Roman Catholic archbishop of the archdiocese of Chicago and the cathedral of the Eparchy of Chicago of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, each with equal authority to govern the Catholics of their own Rite within the same territory. Perhaps the most bellicose remark in Foraneus’ article is the comment:
Compared with the Latin rite, the Byzantine is and always will be in a state of inferiority. The Latin is universal, since it comprises many nationalities, none of which can claim the language of the sacred ceremonies as its own. Religion being for all, and the same for all, it would be lowered by being dragged down to the level of a merely national concern. The Latin language brings this to memory.9
Byzantine Catholics “always will be in a state of inferiority,” he argues, because the Latin language is a unifier of all cultures and nationalities. “It would seem,” he insists, “that the practice of the ‘West’ is more in accordance with the general principles of Christianity,” than the East.10 The opinions expressed in Foraneus’ hostile essay largely represented an American view, a view that was not shared by most Catholics in Europe, and certainly not shared by the Successors of St. Peter in Rome.
Bishop John Ireland (Photo: Spokane Catholic Diocese Archive)As can be expected, Ruthenian Catholic clergy by the turn of the century reacted with “a basically anti-Vatican movement that reached its peak in 1902.”
They were not interested in denouncing their communion with Rome, but they were deeply exasperated by what they perceived to be a lack of hierarchical support coming from the Vatican. Aware of the frictions between Eastern and Western Rite Catholics in America at that time, Bishop Andrei Sheptytsky (1865-1944), the Metropolitan Archbishop of Lviv, turned his attention across the globe to encourage Greek Catholics in the United States to, as Kaszczak notes, “preserve their union with Rome.”12 Proponents of this Eastern Catholic movement promulgated reactionary accusations against America’s Roman Catholic hierarchy, openly suggesting that that Latin Rite bishops had mistreated the Greek Catholics in their dioceses. In 1902, Metropolitan Sheptytsky attempted to “curb this rising anti-Vatican sentiment by issuing a pastoral letter . . . criticizing the ‘radical priests’ both for their actions and their anti-Roman views.”13 This created internal disputes between Greek Catholics, though despite these tensions the Eastern Rite Catholic population continued to swell.
By early 1904, America had ninety-five Byzantine Rite churches, mostly located in the Eastern and Midwestern states; Pennsylvania had the most, with fifty-seven parishes, and Ohio followed next with ten.14 These parishes were pastored almost entirely by priests from the Old Country: forty-seven were from Hungary, eighteen were from Galicia, and only two were from the United States.15 It is fair to admit that Eastern Rite Catholics at the turn of the century had largely formed into ethnic enclaves, though this was not uncommon of all immigrant communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even of Latin Rite Catholics.
Wilkes-Barre and the Formation of Factions
Added to this mix of tensions between Latin and Greek Rite Catholics was an ongoing conflict within the Byzantine clergy. On October 29, 1890, the first gathering of Ruthenian priests was convened at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to consider how navigate the dominantly Latin Rite Catholic setting they had immigrated into. At the meeting were nine Greek Catholic priests, who collectively decided to petition the Church authorities in Rome for the appointment of a Vicar General to oversee all Byzantine Rite Catholics in the United States.16 In December of the following year, Ruthenian clergy gathered again and wrote a formal document to submit to the Apostolic Delegate on behalf of all Greek Catholics in America, and the intermediary between the Ruthenian clergy and the pope’s representative was Father Nicephor Channath, the close personal friend of Father Alexis Toth. Channath was not only expected to deliver the petition to the Apostolic Deligate, but he was additionally commissioned to function as the Greek Catholic intermediary between the Eastern Rite priests and the Latin bishops. Channath continued in this role until 1896, but he still could not curb the tide of factionalism between Greek Catholic priests who had divided into the radical anti-Rome group and the more moderate faction that still desired to maintain a peaceful accord with the Western Rite bishops.17
Perhaps the most notorious result of these factions was the conflict, mentioned above, between Bishop Ireland and Father Toth and Toth’s conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church; much ink is still spilled over this incident. From the Eastern Orthodox point of view, Toth’s conversion is described as a “return” to Orthodoxy, and from the Catholic point of view Toth’s fateful decision was an act of “disobedience” and a break from the authentic “Church founded by Christ.”18 Whatever the interpretation, as Procko puts it, Toth “became an energetic advocate of the Russian Orthodox Church among the Ruthenians in America and a bitter opponent of Catholicism.”19 By 1901, Alexis Toth had succeeded in converting thirteen Ruthenian Catholic congregations to Orthodoxy, causing nearly 7,000 Greek Catholics to become Eastern Orthodox.20 In the end, “Alexis Toth led fifteen Byzantine Catholic parishes with more than 20,000 faithful into the fold of the Russian Orthodox Church.”21
So successful was Toth in influencing Greek Catholic to become Orthodox that on May 24, 1994, he was canonized (glorified) a saint by the Orthodox Church in America.22 Needless to say, Alexis Toth, who had become an evangelist for Eastern Orthodoxy, and his close friend, Nicephor Channath, who was a tireless supporter of communion with the Successor of Saint Peter, had become bitterly estranged. By 1907, the pope was aware of the turbulent situation in America between Latin and Greek Catholics, and he had settled upon a possible resolution. During that year, Pope St. Pius X (1835-1914) appointed Monsignor Soter Ortynsky, OSBM (1866-1916) the first Eastern Rite bishop of America. Despite Ortynsky’s tireless efforts to reign in tensions between Eastern and Western Rite Catholics, and the sustained conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy, conflicts and conversions continued during his life in America.
One event, however, shines through the shadows of this era with a light of Christian charity and reconciliation; Fathers Alexis Toth and Nicephor Channath were at last able to set aside their ecclesiological disagreements and embrace, at least in their hearts, the Christian unity called for by Christ.
Alexis Toth and the Grace of Reconciliation
On December 30, 1898, Father Channath lay dying on his hospital bed in Lackawanna Hospital in Scranton, Ohio. As he was nearing death, he agonized over the rupture between himself and his beloved friend, Father Alexis Toth. By then Toth was a Russian Orthodox priest, deeply despised by many Greek Catholic clergy, and seemingly unapproachable. Channath could not bear to die unreconciled to his friend and so summoned two Latin Rite Catholic priests to his hospital room and asked them an urgent favor. As the end advanced, the barriers and bereavements precipitated by cultural and ecclesiological difference faded in light of the grace of friendship and reconciliation, and when Father Toth received the two emissaries from his old companion his heart was softened. The next day, Nicephor Channath passed beyond the veil, and George Eliot’s (née Mary Evans, 1819-1890) remark that, “It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much,”23 seemed preferable to the spiritual malady of resentment. On the day of Channath’s funeral Liturgy, January 2, 1899, Father Alexis Toth sent a wreath of flowers to the body of his friend as an expression of his grief and reconciliation. Their love for each other as brothers in Jesus Christ had been restored, although the manager of the funeral home refused the flowers.24
When Toth learned that his wreath was refused, he issued a response in the Ukrainian periodical, Svoboda. Toth was deeply afflicted by this refusal, and recalled that Channath had sent the two Latin Rite priests to offer and seek forgiveness for the “unpleasantries” exchanged between the two friends. Toth wrote: “This was said in a Christian manner and I as a Christian and as a priest, touched to the depth of my heart, replied. . . . ‘I forgive all and remember no injury’.”25 In their supreme act of Christian charity and friendship, Nicephor Channath and Alexis Toth illustrated the grace of Christian reconciliation, despite the divisions that persisted between Toth’s followers and the Eastern Rite clergy in America who remained in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Reconciliation between Latin and Eastern Rite Catholics was more difficult to come by, and it was not until the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II (1920-2005) that conditions between these two Churches began to genuinely improve.
Perhaps it was the fact that John Paul II’s mother was a Byzantine Rite Catholic that made him especially sensitive to the situation of Eastern Rite faithful; he was known to have deeply esteemed the richness of the Byzantine Liturgy. On May 2, 1995, the pope issued an encyclical entitled Orientale Lumen, or “Light of the East,” in which he recognized the difficulties of being an Eastern Rite believer in a predominantly Western Rite Church. He wrote that a “conversion is . . . required of the Latin Church, that she may respect and fully appreciate the dignity of Eastern Christians, and accept gratefully the spiritual treasures of which the Eastern Catholic Churches are the bearers, to the benefit of the entire catholic communion.”26
Not only did Pope John Paul II call Latin Rite Catholics to a “conversion” of heart toward their Eastern Rite brothers and sisters, but he also reminded all Catholics in communion of the Bishop of Rome that the Christian East is essential to the “full realization of the Church’s universality.”27 He also acknowledges how the Eastern Catholic Churches can enrich the spiritual experience of the Western Church, asserting: “Indeed, in comparison to any other culture, the Christian East has a unique and privileged role as the original setting where the Church was born.”28 While the Liturgy, spirituality, and theology of the Eastern Rites might at first appear foreign to many Latin Rite Catholics, these differences are part of what makes Catholicism truly catholic (universal), and they provide a window into how Christians have worshiped in the East for nearly two millennia.
And regarding the tensions that have plagued East and West for centuries caused by disagreements over the discipline of priestly celibacy, several Popes have tried, almost in vane, to calm the storm of controversy. When addressing this issue, Pope Paul VI (1897-1978) insisted that in the East there has never been a debate over the fact that some priests are celibate and some are married; married clergy is part of the East’s tradition. As Paul VI put it, that Eastern priests can be married “is due to the different historical background of that most noble part of the Church, a situation which the Holy Spirit has providentially and supernaturally influenced." In reality, the different views of priestly celibacy is not merely a matter of discipline; they are a matter “providentially” ordained by the Holy Spirit. This view was again asserted on June 14, 2014, when Pope Francis ratified the “Pontifical Precepts About Married Eastern Clergy,” and declared that married Eastern clergy have full rights to practice their ministry in all territories of the Church, even those places “outside the traditional Eastern territory.”
Perhaps the history of Eastern Rite Catholics in the United States would have unfolded in an entirely different fashion had Bishop Ireland and Father Alexis Toth met under the conditions outlined by Popes John Paul II, Paul VI, and Francis, but we can nonetheless be grateful for the improved atmosphere today between the “two lungs of the Church,” as John Paul II referred to the Eastern and Western parts of the Catholic Church. Today this relationship is marked by a spirit of collaboration, better understanding, and appreciation between the Churches, and the example of reconciliation between Alexis Toth and Nicephor Channath continues to bear fruit as past prejudices are slowly set aside to better realize the work that Christ has commissioned all his followers to accomplish.
Endnotes:
1 Matt 26: 38 (NAB).
2 William Blake, “Jerusalem,” in The Poetical Works of William Blake, Viol. 2, Edwin J. Ellis, ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1906), 453.
3 This dialogue is quoted in D. Oliver Herbel, Turning Toward Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 25. See Kieth S. Russin, “Father Alexis G. Toth and the Wilkes-Barre Litigations,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 3 (1972): 132-133.
4 Herbel, Turning Toward Tradition, 32. Also see Marvin R. O’Connell, John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988), 269-271.
5 Bodhan P. Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia: A History of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the U.S.A.” (PhD diss, University of Ottawa, 1963), 34.
6 Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia,” 34.
7 Ivan Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Establishment of the Ukrainian Cathlolic Church in the United States (Toronto, CA: The Basilian Press, 2013), 18.
8 Foraneus, “Some Thoughts on the Ruthenian Question in the United States and Canada,” Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 52 (January 1915), 43.
9 Foraneus, “Some Thoughts on the Ruthenian Question,” 46.
10 Foraneus, “Some Thoughts on the Ruthenian Question,” 46.
11 Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, 33.
12 Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, 33.
13 Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, 35.
14 Kalendar Greko Kaftoliceskaho Soedinenija (Munhall-Homestead, PA: Greek Catholic Union, 1905), 160.
15 Kalendar Greko Kaftoliceskaho Soedinenija, 160.
16 H. J. Heuser, “Greek Catholics and Latin Priests,” American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 9 (March 1891): 198.
17 Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia,” 38.
18 See Herbel, Turning Toward Tradition, 37; Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia,” 41; and Declaration Dominus Jesus, no. 16.
19 Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia,” 41.
20 Procko, “The Byzantine Catholic Province of Philadelphia,” 42.
21 Athanasius B. Pekar, OSBM, Our Past and Present: Historical Outlines of the Byzantine Ruthenian Metropolitan Province (Pittsburgh: Byzantine Seminary Press, 1974), 39-40.
22 Herbel, Turning Toward Tradition, 11.
23 George Eliot, The Works of George Eliot, Vol. 7, Middlemarch (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1901), 359.
24 See Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, 25.
25 Svoboda, 26 January 1899. In Kaszczak, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, 26.
26 Pope John Paul II, Orientale Lumen, No. 21.
27 Pope John Paul II, Orientale Lumen, No. 21.
28 Pope John Paul II, Orientale Lumen, No. 5.
29 Pope Paul VI, On Priestly Celibacy, No. 38.
30 Pontificia Praecepta de Clero Uxorato Orientaali (Pontifical Precepts About Married Eastern Clergy), 14 June 2014.
ATTEMPTS AT CREATING A WESTERN ORTHODOX RITE
Historical Outline
by Jean-François Mayer
Religioscope – May 2002
N.B.: This article resumes, with a few updates and the addition of a “sitography”, large extracts from a text named “Must Orthodoxy be Byzantine? Attempts at creating a western Orthodox rite”, published five years ago in a collective work called Regards sur l’Orthodoxie. Mélanges offerts à Jacques Goudet (under the direction of Germain Ivanoff-Trinadtzaty), Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 1997, pp. 191-213. Religioscope thanks the publisher Ed. L'Age d'Homme for having authorized this article and takes advantage of the occasion to remind its readers about the considerable production of this firm, and especially its major contribution to publishing Slavonic literature.
Westerners who join the Orthodox Church feel that they are the legitimate heirs of western Christianity of the first millennium. This, however, brings up the question about the ways to find attachments to this heritage: Will this simply be a question of incorporating it as a fundamental spiritual element of Orthodox tradition, or can we try to find the specific practices of an Orthodox West, or even “orthodoxise” western liturgical practices? It is not surprising that some individuals or groups have attempted to find a western Orthodox way with its own rites. Historically, this phenomenon has found itself in interaction with several other developments: the emergence of ecumenical concerns, Anglo-Catholicism, Old Catholicism, the liturgical research movement, the Russian emigration and the Orthodox diaspora in general. We will sketch out a summary of the attempts to create a western Orthodox rite, by endeavoring not to simply repeat already existing studies 2.
Orthodoxy and plurality of rites
Over the most recent centuries, the Orthodox Churches have been confronted by the problem of liturgical plurality. This was against the reforms of Patriarch Nikon intended to align Russian practices with those of the Greek Church, which in the 17th century caused the resistance of the Old Believers 3. From 1800, those Old Believers who returned to the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church were allowed to keep their rite (edinovertsy) 4. In 1845 and the following years, some tens of thousands of Estonians and Latvians massively joined the Orthodox Church and brought some of their Lutheran usages, specially hymns into parishes specially instituted for them 5. Even the use of the organ would have been introduced into some Baltic Orthodox churches! In May 1897, 9,000 Nestorians of the Uremia region, with their bishop Jonas, asked to enter the communion of the Russian Church, and the union was solemnly celebrated in Saint Petersbourg in March 1898. Though some Russian clerics were favourable for these converts to keep their rites, in a similar way to Roman Catholic practices in this matter, the Russian missionaries sent to Uremia were rapidly known for their efforts of bringing the Syrian Oriental liturgical heritage of the newly received parishes into line with Russian usage 6.
Finally, we cannot forget that the presence of uniate groups brought the Orthodox Church to face the question of the plurality of rites. Also, some authors consider the foundation of western rite Orthodox communities as “uniatism in reverse” and consider that this experience constitutes “does not so much constitute original creations but rather conjectural and limited borrowings from the Roman model” 7.
It can be said in any case that the Oriental Patriarchs were not at the origin of western rite Orthodox communities: the initiative always came from western individuals or small groups of converts (or candidates for conversion).
The Anglican “Non-Juring” bishops of the 18th century
The first case of the question being asked of western rite Christians entering into communion was that of the Anglican “Non-Juring” bishops, those who refused to deny their allegiance to James II (1633-1701) — who converted to Roman Catholicism and was overthrown in 1688 — and to swear an oath to William III whilst the Sovereign to whom they had sworn loyalty was still living. Some persevered in their separation after the death of James II and some entered into correspondence with the Oriental Patriarchs in view to exploring the possibilities of union (but not all the Non-Jurors approved this step) 8.
This contact was established through the presence in England (from 1712) of an emissary of the Patriarch of Alexandria, Archbishop Arsenios of Thebaide, who received several persons into the Orthodox Church during his stay in England. He was not the first Orthodox cleric to come, and a Greek chapel had been running for some time in London during the last quarter of the 17th century. In 1716, a group of Non-Jurors wrote propositions in view to a “concordat between the Orthodox and Catholic remnant of the British Churches and the Oriental Catholic and Apostolic Church”, then entrusted the text to Archbishop Arsenios. He went to Moscow to take it to Czar Peter the Great, who was interested in the project and gave the document to the Oriental Patriarchs.
Reading the exchange between the Non-Jurors and the authorities of the Orthodox Church 9reveals a fundamental ecclesiological misunderstanding: the English presented themselves on a footing of agility in view to union and made rash proposals, for example the recognition of the Church Jerusalem as the “true mother Church”. They did not intend to adopt the Orthodox Faith without restriction, but imposed their conditions. For the liturgy, to draw near to the Oriental Patriarchs, they proposed the restoration of the old English liturgy “with appropriate additions and alterations”. They refused to invoke the Mother of God and the Saints, and showed great reticence faced with the veneration of icons. The common response of the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem and Alexandria is without any ambiguity, and immediately emphasizes that the Orthodox Church has always remained faithful to the doctrine of the Apostles. It refuses to open the door to any doctrinal compromise with any kind of Protestantism whatsoever. To stay at the level of the liturgical question, the Patriarchs were very careful: if the union is truly wanted, the customs should not be “entirely foreign and diametrically opposed to each other”, which would introduce a cause for breakdown 10.
“(…) the Oriental Orthodox Church recognizes only one liturgy (…), written by the first Bishop of Jerusalem, James the brother of the Lord, and then abridged on account of its length by the great Father Basil, Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, and then abridged again by John, the Patriarch of Constantinople the Golden Mouthed (…). It is therefore fitting that those who are called the remnant of primitive piety should use it when they will be united with us, so that there should be no point of disagreement between us (…). For the English liturgy, we have no knowledge of it, not having seen or read it. However, we feel some suspicion about it, for the reason of the number and variety of heresies, schisms and sects in this area, fearing that the heretics may have introduced some corruption or deviation into right Faith. It is therefore necessary for us to see and read it. We will then approve it as just or reject it as disagreeing with our immaculate Faith. When we will have considered it thus, if it needs corrections, we will correct it. If possible, we will give it the sanction of an authentic form. However, what need of another liturgy have those who possess the true and sincere liturgy of our divine Father Chrysostome (…)? If those who call themselves the remnant of primitive piety are prepared to receive it, they will be more intimately and closely linked with us.” 11.
Later exchanges of correspondence did not allow the resolution of several points of disagreement, not to mention the interventions of the “official” Anglican Church to discourage the Oriental Patriarchs for pursuing talks with a small group of “schismatics”. The Non-Jurors slowly disappeared.
The passage quoted above shows under which angle, as from the first mention of a possibility of a western rite, this problem was tackled, placing the bishops into a dilemma: they could not absolutely exclude the possibility of a non-Byzantine rite, but they felt potential dangers linked with its adoption at the same time.
The 19th century context
It was necessary to wait until the 19th century for the question to return to the agenda. The historical context was more favourable. In the aftermath of the commotion of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, there was a “growing push for spiritual unity” 12, reinforced by awareness that the growth of impiety was a threat for all believers. Thus, in 1857, some German bishops took the initiative of an association to pray for unity between “Greeks” and “Latins”, and the Baron of Haxthausen wrote to Metropolitan Philaret to try to convince him to launch a similar initiative in Russia 13.
There was a growing interest in England for the Church and the Orthodox Liturgy, which later resulted in initiatives in view to drawing together. The “Apostles” of the “Catholic Apostolic” Church (the “Irvingite” movement), which came into being in the England of the 1830’s, took on considerable liturgical work based on a study of different existing traditions, and drew up a Eucharistic rite “of Roman for, English language and Oriental ethos — including a certain number of direct borrowings from oriental liturgies” 14.
The Old Catholic movement, from the reaction against Vatican I, affirmed since the Congress of Munich of 1871 that it aspired to re-establish union with the “Greek Church” the eucharistic rite published in 1880 by Bishop Edward Herzog (Switzerland) incorporated the epiclesis, but placed it before the words of institution 15. For both national and Christian reasons, General Alexander Kireeff (1832-1910) devoted nearly forty years of reconciliation efforts between the Orthodox Church and the Old Catholics, seeing in the latter a “Western Orthodox Sister Church” with which there was no dogmatic difference and whose hierarchy was considered as valid 16.
There was also a greater openness to the western approaches from the Russian Church, usually the main interlocutor at this time 17. The reports of the procurator of the Holy Synod show the attention given manifestations of sympathy for the Orthodox liturgical traditions in the Anglican Church (it was noted that, apart from the translations of the liturgical texts, several Anglican parishes began “gradually to introduce our liturgical chant”) 18 and the concern to provide means for non-Orthodox to approach the Church, as much in Russia as in other countries 19. Finally, we should not forget the cases of conversions to the Orthodox Church in the west during the 19th century. That of Father Wladimir Guettée (1816-1892) is one of the best known 20, but there were others.
A pioneer of the western rite: J.J. Overbeck
Among these converts, a figure stands out, who made a golden thread of the western rite in the Orthodox Church throughout his life: Julian Joseph Overbeck (1821-1905), of German origin, ordained a Catholic priest in 1845, went over to Protestantism in 1857 and went to England the same year, where he devoted himself to publishing Syrian manuscripts (especially the texts of Saint Ephraim the Syrian), then officially received into the Orthodox Church in London in 1869 21. A revealing detail: he would have wanted to take this step from 1865 and himself dates his decisive encounter with Orthodox tradition from this time. However, according to some sources, he would first of all have wanted to obtain the recognition of his Western Orthodox Church plan, and this led him to defer his formal decision 22.
From his conversion until his death, he remained of an indefectible loyalty — despite the disappointments felt in relation to the realization of some projects. His ecclesiology refuses any “branch theory”:
“The Orthodox Church is unquestionably the Church of undivided Christianity, for she rests on the seven Ecumenical Synods (…). It was also true that the Church of undivided Christianity was exclusively the authentic Catholic Church, to the exclusion of any other. The Orthodox Church is also the only and unique Catholic Church, to the exclusion of any other.
“Neither the Roman Church nor the Protestant denominations (to which the Anglican Church belongs) can pretend to be the Catholic Church or parts of it. They are nothing other that heterodox bodies and are outside the Church.” 23
It is this very logic that justifies the re-establishment of a western rite Orthodox Church in Overbeck’s view: even though the notions of “Oriental Church” and “Orthodox Church” provisionally coincide, they are not identical or synonyms. He refused any idea of “orientalizing” western converts and showed his critical attitude towards another convert, Timothy (Stephen) Hatherly (1827-1905), who tried to set up a Byzantine Rite Orthodox parish for British converts. Overbeck’s plan to restore the Western Orthodox Church was entirely something else:
“ How can we transform the present heterodox Western Church into an Orthodox Church and thus make it like, in essentials, as its was before the schism? – Reject everything that is heterodox in Roman Catholic teaching and book, and you will have, in the essentials, the Western Catholic Orthodox Church of before the schism.” 24
Overbeck’s idea was therefore to undertake a task of purifying the existing western rites: we will see this idea reappear several times. In his enthusiasm and energy, Overbeck, freshly received into the Orthodox Church, did not consider it necessary first of all to go ahead with completely revising the liturgical texts to begin the foundation of a western rite Orthodox community: he promised the Russians that no more than two months were needed! Indeed, once the Ordo Missae was revised (a task already undertaken by Overbeck), it would have been enough to revise the mobile parts progressively throughout the year. The administration of the Sacraments could be provisionally according to the oriental rite. Overbeck emphasized the pastoral importance of this work: in his opinion, parishes using the local language but the oriental rite would never bring in more than a handful of converts, “whilst thousands would flock to the Western Orthodox Church, because it corresponds more with their being and western nature” 25. His “Western Catholic-Orthodox Liturgy of the Mass”, published in Latin and English in London towards 1871 26, essentially follows the Roman Rite, but adds a Byzantine-style epiclesis.
Overbeck dreamed of the day when each nationality would have its national Catholic-Orthodox Church, as in the oriental countries, based on a common Catholic doctrine and the holy canons 27. At one time, he believed Old Catholicism would be the vehicle of these hopes, and thought he could discern a movement of a greater importance that would go beyond the Protestant Reformation in this reaction against Roman abuses 28. However, he was not unaware of the Old Catholics’ hesitations to take the final step 29. A few years later, Overbeck had lost all his illusions about the potential offered by the Old Catholic movement, which had fatally delayed the realization of his own plans. He denounced their indifferentism, having underestimated the dogmatic differences 30. Far from accepting all the dogmas of the Orthodox Church without reserve, the Old Catholics were unfortunately nearer to the Anglican “branch theory”. Rather than follow the advice of Overbeck, who suggested that the Old Catholics should leave the Anglicans out of it, they wanted to include the Anglicans in their discussions with the Orthodox. This brought Old Catholicism increasingly to assimilate itself to Anglicanism 31.
Faced with this failure, Overbeck felt forced to pursue his solitary combat for the creation of a western rite Orthodox Church, based on a petition he wrote in 1867 and sent, bearing several tens of signatures, to the Holy Synod of the Russian Church in September 1869: “We are Westerners and must remain Westerners.” 32Overbeck emphasized the loyalty of the petitioners, who had never held separate religious services, but always attended those of the Greek and Russian parishes, in the hope that their waiting would be answered. The years went by and the group dispersed little by little 33.
The authorities of the Russian Church were seriously interested in Overbeck’s plan, which enjoyed a real esteem. However, for many reasons, especially the obviously unpromising perspectives and very strong resistance from the Greek Church, the Holy Synod finally decided to abandon the project in 1884. However, as Florovsky underlined, “the question brought up by Overbeck was pertinent » 34. His position was awkward for those who dreamed of “reconciliation between the Churches”. This element must often be considered to make a correct interpretation of the background of reactions that later accompanied other attempts to establish western rite Orthodox communities.
Russian Theologians and the Episcopalian Rite
A commission of Russian theologians had again to look into the question of the western rite in 1904, following questions asked by the future Patriarch Tikhon (who was then ministering in the United States) to know if he could authorize the use of the Episcopalian rite (American Prayer Book) if a whole American parish went over to the Orthodox Church.
The theologians consulted revealed ambiguity around some fundamental doctrines in these texts. They emphasized that it was not only necessary to be attentive to their content, but also the ecclesial context in which they were written. As they examined the doubtful points in turn, the commission noted that some rites (that of ordination for example) were not expressly non-Orthodox, but could contain “indirect indications” showing that they rested “on a different dogmatic basis” 35. From now onwards, the “latent inadequacies” of the rite could not be authorized without correction.
“When a rite has been compiled with the special intention of adapting it to Protestant beliefs, it would not be unreasonable, before admitting its use, to subject it to a special revision in the opposite sense.” 36
“The examination of the Book of Common Prayer leads to the overall conclusion that what it contains presents comparatively little material clearly contradicting Orthodox teaching and would therefore not be admissible in Orthodox worship. This conclusion, however, is not derived from the notion of the book being really Orthodox, but simply that it was compiled in a spirit of compromise and that, cleverly avoiding the doctrinal points to be discussed, it attempts to reconcile truly contradictory tendencies. It would follow that those who professed Protestantism and their opponents could both use it in good conscience.” 37
To allow their use by ex-Anglican converts, these texts should firstly be revised in the spirit of the Orthodox Church. The commission also recommended that the clergy should be received with a fresh conditional ordination. The question seems at any rate to have remained theoretical and not to have been applied to date.
Western Rite Communities in the United States
During the 20th century, there were in the United States several cases of attempting to set up western rite Orthodox communities, both in the jurisdiction of traditional Orthodox Churches and in a “wildcat” and non-canonical form. Some of these communities ended up by being received into an Orthodox jurisdiction. One of these cases was the Society of Saint Basil, which came into being indirectly through the action of Bishop Aftimios Ofiesh (1880-1966), who in 1917 became Bishop of Brooklyn and head of the Syrian mission within the jurisdiction of the Russian Church in America. An act signed in 1927 by Metropolitan Plato and several other Russian bishops in America charged Bishop Aftimios to establish the foundations of an autonomous American Church, not linked to ethnic origins, and above all designed for American-born and English-speaking people. However, the time was hardly right, with all the troubles in the Russian Church. Bishop Aftimios ended up by marrying in 1933 38.
He has consecrated several persons, among whom William A. Nichols, who in 1931 was at the origin of the Society of Saint Basil. This was later directed by Alexander Turner, who succeeded in getting the group received into the Antiochian jurisdiction in the United States in 1961 as a western rite community. Indeed, as from 1958, with the approval of Patriarch Alexander III of Antioch, Metropolitan Anthony Bashir authorized the use of the western rite in North America 39.
We cannot say there was a mass movement towards the western rite in the United States, partly because of the reticence of most of the bishops. Towards 1970, if the Syrian Archdiocese firmly continued to support it by explaining that oriental liturgical practice was “foreign to everything known by western Christians”, voices like Father Alexander Schmemann on the contrary feared that spreading the western rite could “dangerous multiply spiritual adventures, examples of which we have seen all too often in the past, and can only hinder the true progress of Orthodoxy in the West” 40.
However, alongside the parishes of the Antiochian jurisdiction, the Russian Synod in Exile, despite misadventures that were still fresh in France (we will come back to this later), had established three western rite parishes in 1968, with Archpriest George Grabbe as their Dean. These parishes had adopted the old calendar, and a commission had been established by the Synod to define guidelines for the use of the western rite. Talking to the faithful of the western rite parish of Greenwich (Connecticut) in November 1968, Father George Grabbe explained in what spirit they should go ahead:
“(…) the West has been separated from Orthodoxy for so many centuries. Life is not static. It is development and growth. This is why it is impossible to return mechanically to forms of Christian life that existed in the West more than a thousand years ago, when it was still Orthodox. To express Orthodoxy again, the western forms must be enriched by the heritage of the centuries of uninterrupted tradition in the life of the Orthodox Church. It experience (…) must become your experience and be incorporated into western liturgical forms.” 41
As often in the experience of the western rite, it also proved to be short-lived. In 1974, in the whole of America, there remained only two western rite parishes under canonical Orthodox jurisdiction, both with the Antiochians 42.
How is it that the movement today is booming, to the point of counting some thirty parishes in North America in 1996? 43Paradoxically we need to look for the reasons in the original religious denominations of the converts, mainly coming from the Episcopalian or Roman Catholic ranks, and reacting against the liturgical (and sometimes doctrinal) upheavals in their communities. As Father Paul Schneirla, head of the Western Rite Vicariate in the Antiochian Archdiocese, recognizes, “we are not conducting a proselytism program, but we represent an option for those who have already rejected the changes in their old denomination” 44.
The liturgical practice represents a “theologically corrected form of worship previously used by the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Communion”. 45 We remain in the line of Overbeck’s attempts in the 19th century or the suggestions made by the 1904 commission of theologians. The recent edition of the missal published by the Western Rite Vicariate contains two liturgies: the “Mass according to the Rite of Saint Tikhon” and the “Mass according to the Rite of Saint Gregory”46. These are symbolic patronages: the first is a revision of the Anglican rite, and the second is an adapted Tridentine Mass, close to the version proposed by Overbeck. Apart from a few details, a Roman Catholic would find the pre-conciliar liturgy, but celebrated in English 47. This pure and simple resuming of a western rite with a few adapted elements avoids the arbitrary nature of a liturgical reconstruction, but also implies the de facto incorporation of post-schism elements. It is revealing that the imagery used in the Vicariate’s publications is often borrowed from medieval or neo-gothic engravings.
Father Alexey Young, an American priest who collaborates in several Orthodox periodicals asked in 1989 to be received into the Western Rite Vicariate of the Antiochian Archdiocese after having ministered for years in a parish of the Russian Church in Exile. He was sensitive to the missionary possibilities that seemed be to opening up and a form of “re-appropriation” of his own western heritage” 48. In June 1996, he resigned from the western rite parish where he served, and asked to return to the jurisdiction of the Russian Church in Exile. He explained:
“I began to like the western rite and understand its authentic pre-schism spirituality and its viable character for our time. (…) However, I am now leaving the western rite movement – not because I don’t like the rite, but because I believe the movement itself within the Antiochian Archdiocese has failed. Of course, it continues to grow numerically (…). However, quantity does not ensure quality, and the direction of this movement has been largely ineffective. In many cases, our western rite clergy and faithful have not been adequately instructed, prepared or guided. They do not understand the spirit of Orthodoxy or even their own pre-schism western heritage. In moist cases, they sought union with the Orthodox Church above all to preserve a rite that had been abolished in the Church to which they formerly belonged. This is not an adequate reason to become Orthodox, and this is not a sufficient justification for a Church to accept them.” 49
Apart from the thirty American parishes, a few western rite parishes in the Antiochian jurisdiction saw the day in the United Kingdom. They originated in an initiative called Pilgrimage to Orthodoxy. In June 1993, some twenty Anglican clerics met to examine the “Orthodox option”, faced with increasingly clear threats of the ordination of women in the Church of England. Some were drawn to the Byzantine Rite, others to the western rite. They contacted the Patriarchate of Antioch (which had made it known that it would not be opposed to receiving British western rite communities 50) and, in May 1995, Bishop Gabriel Saliby (vicar of the Patriarch of Antioch in western Europe) went ahead with the diaconal ordination of a first western rite cleric. This initiative seems to have remained without much impact.
Recreating a pre-schism liturgy? The Catholic-Orthodox Church of France
Until now, we have given attention to attempts at purifying a Roman or Anglican rite. The allusion made above in regard to the Celtic rite indicates another possible way, and indeed followed by some partisans of an Orthodox western rite: attempt to find a direct link, going back centuries, to the pre-schism Orthodox heritage. Guettée already worked on a restoration of a Gallican Liturgy, which would have been celebrated in 1875 at the Academy of theology of Saint Petersbourg (without this initiative coming to anything). The most major and known attempt was born in France, within the Catholic Orthodox Church of France (ECOF).
We do not wish to go into its history, which has been told several times 51, but it is necessary to bring a few stages of this liturgical and ecclesial adventure to mind. The birth of the ECOF resulted from the conjunction of two currents: a group of dissident French Catholics looking for their roots and the will of a few Russians to resurrect the Orthodox tradition in the west.
The first current grouped around Irénée (Louis-Charles) Winnaert (1880-1937) 52, a Catholic priest who left the Roman Church in the aftermath of the Modernist crisis and, having served a few other communities, set up a small independent Catholic Church, but suffered from his isolation.
The second was the Confraternity of Saint Photius, founded in 1925 by eight young emigrated Russians who, far from weeping in the exile, wanted to take advantage of it to proclaim the universality of the Orthodox Church and affirm that “each people, each notion has its personal right in the Orthodox Church, its autocephalous canonical constitution, the safeguard of its customs, its rites, its liturgical language”. It this spirit, the Confraternity set up a “commission for France” from its first year of existence, that envisaged the question of the western liturgy in its different forms 53.
Bishop Winnaert and representatives from the Saint Photius Confraternity entered into relations in 1927. This was followed by a series of contacts with Orthodox hierarchs, with the support of the Saint Photius Confraternity. This resulted in the decree of Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow of 16th June 1936 accepting the little community and allowing it to keep the western rite (a modified Roman Rite). Article 4 of the decree states: “However, the texts of the services must be progressively purged from expressions and thoughts that would be inadmissible for Orthodoxy ». Article 9 says “the parishes united with the Orthodox Church, using the western rite, shall be designated as the Western Orthodox Church”. The clergy shall wear western liturgical vestments, but may use oriental vestments when they take part in oriental rite Orthodox services.
The little community was received into the Orthodox Church in 1937, whilst Bishop Winnaert was already seriously ill. He died shortly afterwards, having asked for the priestly ordination of one of the members of the Saint Photius Confraternity, Eugraph Kovalevsky (1905-1970), to ensure the future of the Western Orthodox Church (which was later named the Orthodox Church of France). Eugraph Kovalevsky became a bishop in 1964 under the name of Jean de Saint-Denis. In the line of the aspirations already shown in the Saint Photius Confraternity, he undertook liturgical research to try to rediscover pre-schism western rites and celebrated the Liturgy according to the Ancient Rite of the Gauls in Paris in May 1945.
Even before the war, there was a rupture in the budding western rite group. Father Lucien Chambault (1899-1965, who later became a monk under the name of Denis), rector of the parish left by Bishop Winnaert, came into conflict with Father Eugraph Kovalevsky. He wanted to hold onto a revised Roman rite. He then founded a Benedictine-inspired priory in Paris. There were some faithful (even more considering that Father Denis had acquired a reputation as a healer and an exorcist, which brought him many visitors! 54), but was unable to keep a stable community of the monks who came to live with him. The western rite parish survived for only two years after the death of Father Denis. According to the observations of Archimandrite Barnabas (Burton), who spent two years as a novice in this community (1960-1962), the western eucharistic rite celebrated “apparently resembled a Catholic Mass in French, and many Catholics came to the chapel for that reason 55.
The experience led by Eugraph Kovalevsky went in another direction. It still continues, despite many upheavals that marks its existence: rupture with the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1953, a short time in the Russian Exarchate of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1953-1954, followed by a desert pilgrimage for several years out of any canonical obedience and without a bishop, then an attachment to the Russian Church in Exile in 1959. This was followed in 1966 by another period of independent existence, resulting in the reception of the ECOF into the Patriarchate of Romania in 1972 and the consecration of a new bishop, Father Gilles Bertrand-Hardy, under the name of Germain de Saint-Denis, to succeed the first deceased bishop. Finally they broke with Bucharest in 1993, bringing the ECOF again outside any canonical framework at the time of writing. Furthermore, recently and for serious reasons, many ECOF clerics found they had no choice other than to leave their bishop. The question of their future integration, to our knowledge, is not yet resolved at the time of revising this text (May 2002).
We will not go into a discussion of the reasons that led to these successive ruptures, mentioned in literature of a polemical style. It suffices to state that the main cause does not seem to be the choice of the western rite in itself, but rather various disciplinary questions and other problems that do not need to be mentioned here.
The enterprise of re-creating an western rite in France did not only attract western converts, but aroused the interest of the Russian emigration, which felt that their exile should be the occasion of bringing something to the West.
Father Eugraph was not the only one to undertake such enterprises in those years. A bishop of the Patriarchate of Moscow in France, Bishop Alexis van der Mensbrugghe, who had actively collaborated in the liturgical work of the Orthodox Church of France before taking his distance, published his restoration of the western rite — not only the Gallican rite, but also the Pre-Celestinian Italic rite (the western rite tradition including these two fundamental variants: Gallican and Italic), for, “in all its historical probity, the Gallican rite, though it is more archaic in its first ritual foundation and it its type of euchology, cannot be imposed in Italy” 56. Bishop Alexis van der Mensbrugghe himself celebrated this liturgy in Italian parishes, wearing western vestments, but nothing seems to have remained of his efforts.
His liturgical work concerns all the services, and not only the eucharistic rite 57. Father Eugraph called the liturgy according to the ancient Gallic rite the Liturgy of Saint Germanus of Paris, for the letters of that bishop of the 6th century, discovered in the 18th century, represent a precious document for knowing about the ancient Gallic rite 58. Of course, “the liturgy of the Gallican rite celebrated in France during the first millennium and replaced by the Roman liturgy after the reform of Charlemagne has not come down to us in the form of a complete text.” 59 In the work of restoration undertaken, the western texts have been enriched by some oriental origin elements 60. The partisans of the ECOF esteem that this would in no case constitute eclectism (the ECOF has several times been accused of going in for “liturgical creation”), but a legitimate compenetration of rites. It is in poetical language that Father Eugraph described the method used to bring the joy of this day into Easter Matins, so marked in Orthodox celebrations:
“Easter Matins in our churches faithfully follow the sober and restrained structure of the Latin rite with its three nocturnes. However, like three petals of a flower thoughtfully folded in on itself, under the action of the joy of the eternal Spring of the Resurrection and as struck by the rays of the sun, the three Latin nocturnes burst forth, blossom and give hospitality to the divinely inspired bees, to the hyms of Byzantium.” 61
Apart from the symbolic manifestation of such an initiative, why was there a decision to restore a rite rather than choose the Byzantine Rite or the “orthodoxized” Roman Rite? The members of the ECOF answer that the first “has never been celebrated as an organic local rite in western Europe” and would therefore represent “a foreign introduction without roots”. For the second, it is presented in a form that was fixed by the Council of Trent and modified by the successive reforms of the Sovereign Pontiffs, and adopting it would bring them to fall “into a replica of uniatism” 62. As for accusations of “archaeological reconstructions”, the ECOF replies that it is rather the “rebirth of a latent tradition of the undivided Church which, from the first bishops of Gaul and through some liturgical currents (monastic and others), was providentially revived by the encounter with Orthodox tradition”.
« Practically, it is a question of a new influx of the wealth of the Byzantine Rite and rediscovered Gallican texts into the liturgical structures originating in France and now perfectly capable of being scientifically re-established (…). This is the indispensable and natural procedure for an native Church.” 63
Orthodoxy and Celtism
The ECOF does not represent the only contemporary attempt at restoring or (re) creating a western rite, but the others happened in the fringes of the Orthodox world. We can especially mention the Patriarchate of Glastonbury and the Celtic Orthodox Church in France. The lives of these two bodies were linked for years and up to a recent date. Claiming the spiritual heritage of an ex-Dominican, Jules Ferette, who would have been consecrated in 1866 as Bishop of Iona by a Jacobite prelate, the group decided in 1944 to “restore the Gallican liturgical rites of western Europe”, the structure of which was not Roman “ and which had much in common with the oriental liturgies.”
“The Glastonbury rite does not pretend to be a reconstruction of any specific Gallican rite, for this would be impossible seeing the many Gallican formularies exist only in the state of fragments or in a Romanized form. The compilers have therefore delved into all the Gallican rites, and where additions were necessary (mostly from the Byzantine rite), have preserved the Gallican ethos and conserved its customs and structures even though the precise words were from another origin.” 64
Called the “Liturgy of Saint Joseph of Arimathia”, the Glastonbury rite claims to be a neo-Gallican rite in the same category as the “Liturgy of Saint Germanus of Paris” 65. In France, the Celtic Orthodox Church, then in the British Patriarchate jurisdiction, also published liturgical texts of the “Celtic” or “neo-Celtic”. The source of this group is in the action of Mar Tugdual, in the world Jean-Pierre Danyel (1917-1968), received into the Orthodox Church of France in 1949, then who went his way in the “independent church” world, from 1955 living an eremitical life in Brittany and cultivating a Celtic spirituality — he was canonized by the Celtic Church in August 1996.
It would be too lengthy here to explain the events of attempts to restore a Celtic Orthodox Church. The Patriarchate of Glastonbury no longer exists, since its Bristish Metropolitan was received with some of his priests and faithful into the Coptic Church in 1994. At this occasion, the diocese abandoned the Glastonbury rite and, bringing projects already begun to a conclusion sooner than expected, adopted the Liturgy of Saint James with the blessing of the Coptic Patriarchate 66. The group in Brittany and the other communities formerly in the Glastonbury jurisdiction, however, remain independent.
Among the attempts to restore ancient rites, we should briefly mention another attempt to restore the Celtic rite on the basis of the Stowe Missal (considered by specialists as the most important document for the study of this rite), on the initiative of Father Kristopher Dowling, who heads a western rite parish in Akron (Ohio) 67.
The Saint Hilarion Monastery in Austin (Texas) has restored the Use of Sarum, celebrated in England before the schism, and publishes very polished editions of the liturgical texts 68. It is to be noted that this group, with parishes also in England and Serbia, has adopted the Julian calendar.
Conclusion
Without giving any judgment, since the purpose of this panorama is simply to inform, what conclusion can we draw from all these efforts? As a “mobilizing myth”, the ideal of a western Orthodox rite is not lacking in attractiveness. We will without doubt continue to observe attempts in this way, and we cannot exclude the possibility of one of them really finishing up by taking root and remaining. However, this should not hide another reality, in a greater number, that of a slow but growing development of Byzantine rite parishes, in spite of the extreme affirmations of a few western rite partisans, who adhere to a kind of liturgical nationalism as they say that the establishment of the Byzantine Rite would be “an impossibility, an aberration” 69: “The oriental rite, foreign to France’s spiritual way, is without profound action and can even give the effect of a narcotic, or a kind of toxin.”[sic!] 70 The Byzantine Rite has been marked by the oriental context in which it matured, but that does not seem to present an insurmountable obstacle.
A plurality of rites would also raise the question of the rite to be used in missionary contexts, outside the western world. Local Byzantine Rite communities have emerged in Africa and Bengal, as in other parts of the world. If the western rite became more widely accepted, must it be reserved only for western origin populations, or could its missionary expansion be envisaged? In the context of globalization, the Byzantine Rite seems destined to impose itself increasingly as a universal rite. This does not exclude national inflexions to some practices or the development of particular characteristics in harmony with the spirit of the Orthodox tradition as time goes on and following a natural movement within the local Church.
It is not sure that this would suffice to remove the accumulated dust of a few centuries to find the Orthodox tradition. This indeed supposes more than a confession of Orthodox faith. It does not suffice for High-Church Anglicans or Old Catholics to delete the Filioque in the Creed, recognize only the Ecumenical Councils of the first millennium and hang icons in their churches to become ipso facto Orthodox, as the experience of more than a century shows.
At a theoretical level, most Orthodox bishops would without doubt admit the possible legitimacy of other rites. In practice, so many fundamental questions and experience bring most of them to remain reticent or hostiles to the practice of the western rite in their dioceses 71.
The Right Reverend Bishop Jean-Nectaire (Kovalevsky) of Saint-Denis (1966-1970)
Sacred Space, Sacred Art and The Power of Women
By Jonathan Paggeau
We live in a confused time. Many of the basic foundations which hold the world together have been made fragile. Up/down, center/periphery, inside/outside have all been eroded in their power to frame existence as we watch floodwaters rise around us. One of the foundations systematically attacked through sophisticated rhetoric and political ideology is the complementary relationship between masculine and feminine. Masculine and feminine are the two solid pillars on which have stood all societies everywhere at all times until the modern era, and the rapport between them is akin to the primordial relationship between heaven and earth itself. Yet, as each action causes an equal and opposite reaction, the unrelenting modern efforts to create a “pure individual” in part by eliminating the social differences between men and women has only been equaled in its ferocity by the simultaneous degrading and objectification of women. It is precisely because powerful elements of society have actively pursued a gender-neutral ideology in which women should, nay, must inhabit any and all masculine attributes, that women have equally had to deal with an unprecedented loss of personhood and a reduction in popular culture to desire inducing machines.
But for those who can see the glimmering spark even in the darkest places, there is a hidden mystery in the otherwise truly unfortunate reduction of women to their sole capacity to seduce, one which hides a very powerful vision of the feminine for those who dare grab the snake by the tail. When seen correctly, seduction is actually an example of the most essential ontological categories. It is a version of the power of manifestation itself, if we see power in the manner I have explained elsewhere within the traditional dyad of power and authority, potestas and auctoritas, potential and actuality.
I see some readers picking up stones already, but please bear with me. Seduction is an interesting aspect of human behavior, for it is not action on the world in its own right, but rather a type of operation which either voluntarily or involuntarily elicits desire to act in others. It is not a commandment, not an injunction which addresses the will of a person, nor is it an act of violence meant to constrain or control. Rather, it is a mix of showing and hiding, the revealing of a mystery expected to call attention and focus action on the object or person which is wittingly or unwittingly seducing the onlooker. This I believe is the most profound aspect of seduction, one which we find also in modern advertising. Seduction is an “asking for attention”, the opening or framing of a space of action within the flow of phenomena. When a young man encounters the world, he might harbor an “idea” of the relationship between the sexes: boy meets girl, marries girl, has children, etc. But the world is composed of 51% women, the young man is surrounded by them. Certainly we are dealing with a multilayered process, but at least at the outset, a particular woman must appear in his experience of the world and somehow “stand out” from the others, elicit in him the desire to pursue a relationship with her in particular rather than all the other women on his horizon. In that manner seduction and desire precede action, in many ways precede choice even.
Of course seduction is only a facet of the larger idea I am hoping to ultimately arrive at. The highest example of the opening of a space for being and action can be seen in the feminine through the womb, the bringing forth of body and providing nurture for the child (for what is nurturing if not providing possibility for a being to unfold?). In paying attention to the poetic imagery surrounding the Mother of God, one will discover many examples of how she appears as the space, the support, the ground from which the Logos appears. If Christ is the sun, then she is the east. If Christ is the glory, then she is the ark. If Christ is the pearl, then she is the shell[1]. Any quick glance at hymnography will render dozens of these comparisons.
If we broaden the structure, we will see the type of the Mother distributed into social extensions of space and body which have traditionally been associated with the feminine. These include the household, the city and the church, both as an actual building as well as the more communal vision of the Church as the body of Christ. I contend that in the story of Christianity, women both as brides and as mothers will systematically precede and surround. As we see the Theotokos showing us her son in the famous Hodogetria icon, women will be there to open the way unto Christ and the cross. And just as the Hodogetria was paraded on the walls to save Constantinople, just as the Mother of God was seen by St. Andrew of Constantinople spreading her veil over the people in protection, other women saints in imitation of the Theotokos, will also be there every time there is need to open up or protect sacred spaces, the cities, the churches and of course the icons.
Recasting the Temptress as Hodogetria
There has been much ink spilled on Eve as the temptress, and in modern times we have wanted to downplay this aspect of the Genesis story as much as possible. Though I understand why and sympathise with those who have done so, I fear in eliminating this aspect completely we will become blind to the wider implications of its structure. If we ignore how Eve tempted Adam unto death, opening to him the possibility of dying, of taking on the garments of skin and all that entails in terms of the multiplying of Man into Humankind, the development of the arts and the movement out of the garden into the world, then we will not understand how this same structure will play itself out into the rest of the cosmic story.
In the Bible there are many examples of seduction unto death[2], but to fully understand them, we must keep in mind the duality of death which I have explained elsewhere. Death is moving away from the unity of a center (heart, garden, holy land, etc.) or a descent back into the earth. This includes both a dissipation into “dust”, but also a “vaccine effect”, a type of external supplement where death becomes a protection from death, hence the patristic image of the dead garments of skin given to Adam and Eve at the fall to protect them. This vaccine effect is also the root of ritual sacrifice which reaches its apex in Christ trampling down death by death.
One of the surprising stories denoting this seduction into death while joining it to the role of the mother is the story of the Jael in the book of Judges. Jael is a Kenite woman who kills Sisera, an enemy king, as he flees a losing battle. Jael invites Sisera into her own tent, connoting a sexual proposal[3], but then covers him with a blanket, gives him milk and puts him to sleep, which are the acts of a mother, only to then murder him by impaling him with a stake through the head. The role of the seductress and the mother are brought together to show a powerful aspect of the feminine. Jael does not contrive Sisera, does not tell him what to do, but rather invites him and answers his physical needs before killing him.
As usual, in Christianity there is a transfigured recasting of the Old Testament testament models, and a place where we see this surprising structure reappear is in the icon of the Nativity. In the icon of the Nativity, the cave plays the role of Jael’s tent, and Christ is shown wrapped in a cloth as Sisera was wrapped in a blanket. The Mother-Child relationship is set out clearly in the Nativity icon, But there is another strain of meaning, since the cave, and more specifically the manger in its design and its role as feeding container for animals, are meant to evoke the tomb (which I have discussed before). And so in the birth of Christ from the Theotokos, Christ’s body appears already both as the space for his life but also the space for his death. Of course the Theotokos does not kill Christ, yet the means of death are analogical nonetheless. In the story of Jael, the stake is an explicit image of the nailing of Christ to the cross, and though in the icon of the Nativity this does not need to appear literally, the cross is implied even in the cruciform halo around Christ’s head.
In the New Testament, another of the stories which can help us see the opening of a space for action and more specifically a tempting unto death is in the Wedding at Cana. This story is extremely rich and complex and elucidating it fully would require an entire book, yet there are a few details which could help us along on our subject.
When the wine runs out at the wedding, the Theotokos comes to Christ and tells him: “The wine has run out.” This comment is the statement of a problem, which implicitly contains a call to action. It is a puzzle or a question for the Logos to answer and acts as the frame for his response. Hearing this, Christ would not change a stone into bread, that would not make sense. He must decide if, and if so how, he will provide a solution to the problem. In this manner, the Theotokos is providing a “body”, framing the possibility into which he will begin the process of manifesting the Logos. Christ’s answer is telling. “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” My hour has not yet come? As we will see later in the Gospel of St-John, this expression relates to the death of Christ[4]. And so my own question echoes that of Christ; what could a lack of wine at a wedding have to do with his death? Already though we see that it is related, even if we might not understand why[5]. We see that the Theotokos is not only opening a body, a path, for the manifestation of the Logos, but this body is already seen as leading to death at the very outset. Somehow she is mirroring the act of Eve, who giving her husband the fruit, did not tell him what to do, did not constrain him in any way, but by placing the possibility before him, Eve “framed” Adam’s course of action and seduced him unto death. Of course in Christianity this motif, this cosmic puzzle will be completed, leading from death unto salvation and resurrection. As the New Eve, as the Hodogetria, the Mother of God will also invite us to taste of the fruit of the knowledge of Heaven and Earth hanging on the bow of the cross, seducing us also unto dying to ourselves so we can commune with her son.
Opening the way
The story does not stop here. Even the most superficial look at Church history will show us women being the hidden precedent of men at every turn, the ones whose whispers hide deep under public historical accounts. They are wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters who by their example, their prayers and often secret gestures, entice their sons, husbands, brothers, grandsons into the Church. The story starts already in the Bible, with St-Mary Magdalene preceding the apostles in encountering the resurrected Christ.
There is also the wife of Pontius Pilate, sending him a message to have nothing to do with Christ’s condemnation. The wife of Pilate is an interesting example as she will later be venerated as a saint under the name St-Procula (or Procla). She also sets the stage for a pattern of the “Christian royal woman” who precedes the conversion of the king. This story is so common and is found at so many of the major historical conversions that all I can give is a list for the reader to explore. Examples I could find include St-Helena, the mother of St-Constantine the Great the first Christian Roman Emperor, St-Olga the grandmother of St-Vladimir of Kiev the first Christian King of the Rus, St-Clotilde the wife of Clovis the first Christian Carolingian King.
These are the most known, but more hide in the margins, such as Bertha the wife of King Aethelbert of Kent or Doqus Qatun, the Christian wife of Hulagu Kahn[6], the Mongol Khan who destroyed Bagdad in 1258, and others whose stories have not reached us.
All these women were Christian first, opened the way to Christ, and though the historical record does not always attribute conversions to their direct influence, the pattern is there for those who perceive the mystery. Other women will precede the great theologians, these examples include St-Macrina, sister of the Cappadocian fathers St-Basil the Great and St-Gregory of Nyssa in the East, and St-Monica the mother of Blessed Augustine in the West.
Sacred Space
As I mentioned earlier, the notion of the body as taking its root in the feminine, in the womb, has social extensions. The extension of living space is the house, the city and church seen as feminine in their representations. Looking at these extensions of the body will provide the key to seeing many of the actions of imperial women as an important root and protection for liturgical art in Christianity. This begins with St-Helena equal to the Apostles, mother of St-Constantine who initiates the rebuilding of Jerusalem, defining the shape of the city and its shrines, therefore spatially mapping the life of Christ through a series of churches in the Holy Land. Another powerful example is how during the Nika riots of 532AD, when a mob attacked the palace complex, destroying the original Hagia Sophia church, the Emperor Justinian wanted to flee, but it was the Empress Theodora who convinced him to stay by saying, “The Royal Purple is the Noblest Shroud”. What a powerful almost prophetic statement bringing together the notion of clothing, the city, seduction and the duality of death. The rebuilding of Hagia Sophia would become the model for Orthodox Churches until today.
But it is in the story of icons that we find the highest examples of the role of women in the physicality of the Church and its art. Just as the Mother of God stretches her veil as protection, during the entire time of iconoclasm, it was women who preserved the practice of iconography in Constantinople. It was Empress Irene who called the seventh ecumenical council which made official the veneration of icons, and it was St-Theodora the wife of Theophilos who finally restored icons in what has come to be celebrated as the Feast of Orthdoxy.
We know mostly of Irene and Theodora and their role in the restoration of icons, but Mother Nectaria who publishes Road to Emmaus Journal has written a wonderful article in which she explains that it was not just those two, but that iconodule wives were chosen by iconodule Empresses for their sons, thereby creating a secret chain of women preserving the veneration of icons even when their husbands were hostile to images. Mother Nectaria even suggests, with convincing arguments, that the Byzantine practice of the “bride-show”, where a bride for an Emperor was chosen through a kind of beauty pageant, might have been a strategy for the sitting Empress to chose an iconophile wife for her son. If this is true, the entire story becomes a powerful tribute to beauty, seduction and the secret power of the feminine in the transformation of the world.
Mother Nectaria tells a wonderful story of the future iconoclast Emperor Theophilos approaching St-Cassiane who had been one of the possible future brides chosen by his step mother at a bride-show:
“First drawn to Cassiane, the young Emperor approached her saying, “Through a woman came forth the baser things,” implying the sin of Eve, to which Cassiane responded, “And through a woman came forth the better things,” recalling the Incarnation.”[7]
Displeased with this comment, the future Emperor finally chose to marry another of the candidates, Theodora. St-Cassiane would later turn to monasticism and become a renown abbess and hymnographer. Finally, though the Emperor Theophilos was the most ardent of iconoclasts, his wife Theodora would restore the veneration of icons for good after his death, proving indeed that “through woman came forth the better things”.
The restoration of the icons is in many ways a “transformation of the garments of skin”, for all these physical images, these multiple versions of the invisible prototypes are subject to death, to decay and destruction. But the images are also the testimony of Christ and show how the garments of skin can become garments of glory, that death and multiplicity have been changed by Christ into vehicles of grace unto the ends of the earth. This is the mystery of Christianity itself, how the end of Eve’s seduction would render all at once, all that was promised even in ill-will. Man would both die and become god, one aspect holding the other by the hand through the power of the cross, which is both the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. The question posed by Eve in the Garden would finally be fully answered, the seemingly bottomless gap established in that primordial moment would be filled to overflow by Christ who is all in all.
——————————————————————————————-
[1] For more examples of these relations, see Henry Macguire, Body, Clothing, Metaphor: The Virgin in Early Byzantine Art in The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images, Ashgate Publishing. 2011.
[2] Different examples will play out the relation between seduction, desire and death in multiple ways which would need further elaboration. But a summary list worth thinking about would include the wives of Abraham and Isaac being kidnapped by Abimelech (Gen. 20,26. In this example, it is rather the threat of death and not death itself), the rape of Dinah (Gen. 34) the hiding of Joshua and Caleb by the prostitute Rahab (Josh. 2 This story is similar to the one of Jael, yet has an inverted ending, where the hidden enemies are not killed but her own city falls), Esther and the death of Haman (Est. 7), Salomé and the death of St-John the Baptist (Mat. 14) , Judith and the death of Holofernes (Judith 10-13). There are also important non- Biblical versions of this, the most obvious is the story of the Trojan war.
[3] For a description of why this is so and how the Hebrew denotes sexual hospitality, see Thalia Gur-Klein, Sexual Hospitality in the Hebrew Bible: Patronymic, Metronymic, Legitimate and Illegitimate Relations, Routledge, 2014. p.39
[4]Compare to John 12:23, 13:1, 17:1
[5] But what does changing water into wine have to do with the fall or with the death of man? To answer we need to consider the other instance in the Bible where there is a clear transition between water and wine, and this is found at the Biblical origin of wine. After Noah leaves the ark once flood waters are abated, he plants a vine. Noah then gets drunk on the wine he produces, strips and passes out. The story plays out like an inversion of the Garden of Eden story, for the unconscious naked Moses becomes a stumbling stone for Ham who stares at his nakedness and is cursed for his indecent gesture. This re-establishes the curse and fall which had been briefly held in check by the new rainbow covenant made with God. And so Noah’s wine coming after the flood becomes the place of the new fall. Wine is also an interesting version of the garments of skin, human technology, since it is made by turning the process of decomposition against itself. The very process of the “dying” of the fruit, when contained, creates an intoxicating beverage. In order to understand all of this further, one can also ponder the places in the Bible where water is turned into blood, for example the first plague of Egypt which eventually led to the death of the first born and to the Passover-Pascha, also Christ’s final moments in the Garden where he sweats blood.
[6] Hulagu did not convert, but still portrayed himself as the new Constantine in his iconography.
[7] Mother Nectaria Mclees. Byzantine Bride-Shows and The Restoration of Icons, in Road to Emmaus #51, Fall 2012, p.57
By Jonathan Paggeau
We live in a confused time. Many of the basic foundations which hold the world together have been made fragile. Up/down, center/periphery, inside/outside have all been eroded in their power to frame existence as we watch floodwaters rise around us. One of the foundations systematically attacked through sophisticated rhetoric and political ideology is the complementary relationship between masculine and feminine. Masculine and feminine are the two solid pillars on which have stood all societies everywhere at all times until the modern era, and the rapport between them is akin to the primordial relationship between heaven and earth itself. Yet, as each action causes an equal and opposite reaction, the unrelenting modern efforts to create a “pure individual” in part by eliminating the social differences between men and women has only been equaled in its ferocity by the simultaneous degrading and objectification of women. It is precisely because powerful elements of society have actively pursued a gender-neutral ideology in which women should, nay, must inhabit any and all masculine attributes, that women have equally had to deal with an unprecedented loss of personhood and a reduction in popular culture to desire inducing machines.
But for those who can see the glimmering spark even in the darkest places, there is a hidden mystery in the otherwise truly unfortunate reduction of women to their sole capacity to seduce, one which hides a very powerful vision of the feminine for those who dare grab the snake by the tail. When seen correctly, seduction is actually an example of the most essential ontological categories. It is a version of the power of manifestation itself, if we see power in the manner I have explained elsewhere within the traditional dyad of power and authority, potestas and auctoritas, potential and actuality.
I see some readers picking up stones already, but please bear with me. Seduction is an interesting aspect of human behavior, for it is not action on the world in its own right, but rather a type of operation which either voluntarily or involuntarily elicits desire to act in others. It is not a commandment, not an injunction which addresses the will of a person, nor is it an act of violence meant to constrain or control. Rather, it is a mix of showing and hiding, the revealing of a mystery expected to call attention and focus action on the object or person which is wittingly or unwittingly seducing the onlooker. This I believe is the most profound aspect of seduction, one which we find also in modern advertising. Seduction is an “asking for attention”, the opening or framing of a space of action within the flow of phenomena. When a young man encounters the world, he might harbor an “idea” of the relationship between the sexes: boy meets girl, marries girl, has children, etc. But the world is composed of 51% women, the young man is surrounded by them. Certainly we are dealing with a multilayered process, but at least at the outset, a particular woman must appear in his experience of the world and somehow “stand out” from the others, elicit in him the desire to pursue a relationship with her in particular rather than all the other women on his horizon. In that manner seduction and desire precede action, in many ways precede choice even.
Of course seduction is only a facet of the larger idea I am hoping to ultimately arrive at. The highest example of the opening of a space for being and action can be seen in the feminine through the womb, the bringing forth of body and providing nurture for the child (for what is nurturing if not providing possibility for a being to unfold?). In paying attention to the poetic imagery surrounding the Mother of God, one will discover many examples of how she appears as the space, the support, the ground from which the Logos appears. If Christ is the sun, then she is the east. If Christ is the glory, then she is the ark. If Christ is the pearl, then she is the shell[1]. Any quick glance at hymnography will render dozens of these comparisons.
If we broaden the structure, we will see the type of the Mother distributed into social extensions of space and body which have traditionally been associated with the feminine. These include the household, the city and the church, both as an actual building as well as the more communal vision of the Church as the body of Christ. I contend that in the story of Christianity, women both as brides and as mothers will systematically precede and surround. As we see the Theotokos showing us her son in the famous Hodogetria icon, women will be there to open the way unto Christ and the cross. And just as the Hodogetria was paraded on the walls to save Constantinople, just as the Mother of God was seen by St. Andrew of Constantinople spreading her veil over the people in protection, other women saints in imitation of the Theotokos, will also be there every time there is need to open up or protect sacred spaces, the cities, the churches and of course the icons.
Recasting the Temptress as Hodogetria
There has been much ink spilled on Eve as the temptress, and in modern times we have wanted to downplay this aspect of the Genesis story as much as possible. Though I understand why and sympathise with those who have done so, I fear in eliminating this aspect completely we will become blind to the wider implications of its structure. If we ignore how Eve tempted Adam unto death, opening to him the possibility of dying, of taking on the garments of skin and all that entails in terms of the multiplying of Man into Humankind, the development of the arts and the movement out of the garden into the world, then we will not understand how this same structure will play itself out into the rest of the cosmic story.
In the Bible there are many examples of seduction unto death[2], but to fully understand them, we must keep in mind the duality of death which I have explained elsewhere. Death is moving away from the unity of a center (heart, garden, holy land, etc.) or a descent back into the earth. This includes both a dissipation into “dust”, but also a “vaccine effect”, a type of external supplement where death becomes a protection from death, hence the patristic image of the dead garments of skin given to Adam and Eve at the fall to protect them. This vaccine effect is also the root of ritual sacrifice which reaches its apex in Christ trampling down death by death.
One of the surprising stories denoting this seduction into death while joining it to the role of the mother is the story of the Jael in the book of Judges. Jael is a Kenite woman who kills Sisera, an enemy king, as he flees a losing battle. Jael invites Sisera into her own tent, connoting a sexual proposal[3], but then covers him with a blanket, gives him milk and puts him to sleep, which are the acts of a mother, only to then murder him by impaling him with a stake through the head. The role of the seductress and the mother are brought together to show a powerful aspect of the feminine. Jael does not contrive Sisera, does not tell him what to do, but rather invites him and answers his physical needs before killing him.
As usual, in Christianity there is a transfigured recasting of the Old Testament testament models, and a place where we see this surprising structure reappear is in the icon of the Nativity. In the icon of the Nativity, the cave plays the role of Jael’s tent, and Christ is shown wrapped in a cloth as Sisera was wrapped in a blanket. The Mother-Child relationship is set out clearly in the Nativity icon, But there is another strain of meaning, since the cave, and more specifically the manger in its design and its role as feeding container for animals, are meant to evoke the tomb (which I have discussed before). And so in the birth of Christ from the Theotokos, Christ’s body appears already both as the space for his life but also the space for his death. Of course the Theotokos does not kill Christ, yet the means of death are analogical nonetheless. In the story of Jael, the stake is an explicit image of the nailing of Christ to the cross, and though in the icon of the Nativity this does not need to appear literally, the cross is implied even in the cruciform halo around Christ’s head.
In the New Testament, another of the stories which can help us see the opening of a space for action and more specifically a tempting unto death is in the Wedding at Cana. This story is extremely rich and complex and elucidating it fully would require an entire book, yet there are a few details which could help us along on our subject.
When the wine runs out at the wedding, the Theotokos comes to Christ and tells him: “The wine has run out.” This comment is the statement of a problem, which implicitly contains a call to action. It is a puzzle or a question for the Logos to answer and acts as the frame for his response. Hearing this, Christ would not change a stone into bread, that would not make sense. He must decide if, and if so how, he will provide a solution to the problem. In this manner, the Theotokos is providing a “body”, framing the possibility into which he will begin the process of manifesting the Logos. Christ’s answer is telling. “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” My hour has not yet come? As we will see later in the Gospel of St-John, this expression relates to the death of Christ[4]. And so my own question echoes that of Christ; what could a lack of wine at a wedding have to do with his death? Already though we see that it is related, even if we might not understand why[5]. We see that the Theotokos is not only opening a body, a path, for the manifestation of the Logos, but this body is already seen as leading to death at the very outset. Somehow she is mirroring the act of Eve, who giving her husband the fruit, did not tell him what to do, did not constrain him in any way, but by placing the possibility before him, Eve “framed” Adam’s course of action and seduced him unto death. Of course in Christianity this motif, this cosmic puzzle will be completed, leading from death unto salvation and resurrection. As the New Eve, as the Hodogetria, the Mother of God will also invite us to taste of the fruit of the knowledge of Heaven and Earth hanging on the bow of the cross, seducing us also unto dying to ourselves so we can commune with her son.
Opening the way
The story does not stop here. Even the most superficial look at Church history will show us women being the hidden precedent of men at every turn, the ones whose whispers hide deep under public historical accounts. They are wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters who by their example, their prayers and often secret gestures, entice their sons, husbands, brothers, grandsons into the Church. The story starts already in the Bible, with St-Mary Magdalene preceding the apostles in encountering the resurrected Christ.
There is also the wife of Pontius Pilate, sending him a message to have nothing to do with Christ’s condemnation. The wife of Pilate is an interesting example as she will later be venerated as a saint under the name St-Procula (or Procla). She also sets the stage for a pattern of the “Christian royal woman” who precedes the conversion of the king. This story is so common and is found at so many of the major historical conversions that all I can give is a list for the reader to explore. Examples I could find include St-Helena, the mother of St-Constantine the Great the first Christian Roman Emperor, St-Olga the grandmother of St-Vladimir of Kiev the first Christian King of the Rus, St-Clotilde the wife of Clovis the first Christian Carolingian King.
These are the most known, but more hide in the margins, such as Bertha the wife of King Aethelbert of Kent or Doqus Qatun, the Christian wife of Hulagu Kahn[6], the Mongol Khan who destroyed Bagdad in 1258, and others whose stories have not reached us.
All these women were Christian first, opened the way to Christ, and though the historical record does not always attribute conversions to their direct influence, the pattern is there for those who perceive the mystery. Other women will precede the great theologians, these examples include St-Macrina, sister of the Cappadocian fathers St-Basil the Great and St-Gregory of Nyssa in the East, and St-Monica the mother of Blessed Augustine in the West.
Sacred Space
As I mentioned earlier, the notion of the body as taking its root in the feminine, in the womb, has social extensions. The extension of living space is the house, the city and church seen as feminine in their representations. Looking at these extensions of the body will provide the key to seeing many of the actions of imperial women as an important root and protection for liturgical art in Christianity. This begins with St-Helena equal to the Apostles, mother of St-Constantine who initiates the rebuilding of Jerusalem, defining the shape of the city and its shrines, therefore spatially mapping the life of Christ through a series of churches in the Holy Land. Another powerful example is how during the Nika riots of 532AD, when a mob attacked the palace complex, destroying the original Hagia Sophia church, the Emperor Justinian wanted to flee, but it was the Empress Theodora who convinced him to stay by saying, “The Royal Purple is the Noblest Shroud”. What a powerful almost prophetic statement bringing together the notion of clothing, the city, seduction and the duality of death. The rebuilding of Hagia Sophia would become the model for Orthodox Churches until today.
But it is in the story of icons that we find the highest examples of the role of women in the physicality of the Church and its art. Just as the Mother of God stretches her veil as protection, during the entire time of iconoclasm, it was women who preserved the practice of iconography in Constantinople. It was Empress Irene who called the seventh ecumenical council which made official the veneration of icons, and it was St-Theodora the wife of Theophilos who finally restored icons in what has come to be celebrated as the Feast of Orthdoxy.
We know mostly of Irene and Theodora and their role in the restoration of icons, but Mother Nectaria who publishes Road to Emmaus Journal has written a wonderful article in which she explains that it was not just those two, but that iconodule wives were chosen by iconodule Empresses for their sons, thereby creating a secret chain of women preserving the veneration of icons even when their husbands were hostile to images. Mother Nectaria even suggests, with convincing arguments, that the Byzantine practice of the “bride-show”, where a bride for an Emperor was chosen through a kind of beauty pageant, might have been a strategy for the sitting Empress to chose an iconophile wife for her son. If this is true, the entire story becomes a powerful tribute to beauty, seduction and the secret power of the feminine in the transformation of the world.
Mother Nectaria tells a wonderful story of the future iconoclast Emperor Theophilos approaching St-Cassiane who had been one of the possible future brides chosen by his step mother at a bride-show:
“First drawn to Cassiane, the young Emperor approached her saying, “Through a woman came forth the baser things,” implying the sin of Eve, to which Cassiane responded, “And through a woman came forth the better things,” recalling the Incarnation.”[7]
Displeased with this comment, the future Emperor finally chose to marry another of the candidates, Theodora. St-Cassiane would later turn to monasticism and become a renown abbess and hymnographer. Finally, though the Emperor Theophilos was the most ardent of iconoclasts, his wife Theodora would restore the veneration of icons for good after his death, proving indeed that “through woman came forth the better things”.
The restoration of the icons is in many ways a “transformation of the garments of skin”, for all these physical images, these multiple versions of the invisible prototypes are subject to death, to decay and destruction. But the images are also the testimony of Christ and show how the garments of skin can become garments of glory, that death and multiplicity have been changed by Christ into vehicles of grace unto the ends of the earth. This is the mystery of Christianity itself, how the end of Eve’s seduction would render all at once, all that was promised even in ill-will. Man would both die and become god, one aspect holding the other by the hand through the power of the cross, which is both the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. The question posed by Eve in the Garden would finally be fully answered, the seemingly bottomless gap established in that primordial moment would be filled to overflow by Christ who is all in all.
——————————————————————————————-
[1] For more examples of these relations, see Henry Macguire, Body, Clothing, Metaphor: The Virgin in Early Byzantine Art in The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images, Ashgate Publishing. 2011.
[2] Different examples will play out the relation between seduction, desire and death in multiple ways which would need further elaboration. But a summary list worth thinking about would include the wives of Abraham and Isaac being kidnapped by Abimelech (Gen. 20,26. In this example, it is rather the threat of death and not death itself), the rape of Dinah (Gen. 34) the hiding of Joshua and Caleb by the prostitute Rahab (Josh. 2 This story is similar to the one of Jael, yet has an inverted ending, where the hidden enemies are not killed but her own city falls), Esther and the death of Haman (Est. 7), Salomé and the death of St-John the Baptist (Mat. 14) , Judith and the death of Holofernes (Judith 10-13). There are also important non- Biblical versions of this, the most obvious is the story of the Trojan war.
[3] For a description of why this is so and how the Hebrew denotes sexual hospitality, see Thalia Gur-Klein, Sexual Hospitality in the Hebrew Bible: Patronymic, Metronymic, Legitimate and Illegitimate Relations, Routledge, 2014. p.39
[4]Compare to John 12:23, 13:1, 17:1
[5] But what does changing water into wine have to do with the fall or with the death of man? To answer we need to consider the other instance in the Bible where there is a clear transition between water and wine, and this is found at the Biblical origin of wine. After Noah leaves the ark once flood waters are abated, he plants a vine. Noah then gets drunk on the wine he produces, strips and passes out. The story plays out like an inversion of the Garden of Eden story, for the unconscious naked Moses becomes a stumbling stone for Ham who stares at his nakedness and is cursed for his indecent gesture. This re-establishes the curse and fall which had been briefly held in check by the new rainbow covenant made with God. And so Noah’s wine coming after the flood becomes the place of the new fall. Wine is also an interesting version of the garments of skin, human technology, since it is made by turning the process of decomposition against itself. The very process of the “dying” of the fruit, when contained, creates an intoxicating beverage. In order to understand all of this further, one can also ponder the places in the Bible where water is turned into blood, for example the first plague of Egypt which eventually led to the death of the first born and to the Passover-Pascha, also Christ’s final moments in the Garden where he sweats blood.
[6] Hulagu did not convert, but still portrayed himself as the new Constantine in his iconography.
[7] Mother Nectaria Mclees. Byzantine Bride-Shows and The Restoration of Icons, in Road to Emmaus #51, Fall 2012, p.57
Judge and Victim : The Two Images of Christ
By Jonathan Paggeau
There are two basic images of Christ in the Church, each marking one of the two poles which hold the very limits of the cosmos. The first image is that of the Pantocrator and its derivatives, essentially Christ shown in the guise of a glorious emperor, both the origin and the final judge of the world. The other basic image is that of Christ on the cross and its derivatives, where he is shown humiliated, beaten and crucified outside the great city as a vicious criminal despite his innocence.
The Pantocrator is an image of authority and power, with Christ appearing as the origin and culmination of all order. In the dome, the glorious Christ is the pinnacle of a cosmic hierarchy of angels and saints which gives structure and shape to the created. It is an image that inspires awe, pride and discipline. The Pantocrator, the great judge with the double edged sword coming from his mouth not only has the power to include, but also the power to exclude and marginalize. This is what order always does. Order, in fact any category, any “logos” or identity must both include and exclude.
Dome at Holy Ascension in Mount Pleasant, SC. Artists: . Vladimir Grygorenko and Dmitri Shkolnik
Yet standing at the other end of the cosmic expanse is the cross, the bridegroom, the burial and other images of Christ’s Passion in which Christ embodies the excluded and marginal space where order breaks down into death — where order, where law, can exclude and kill the innocent. It is an image that inspires compassion, pity and mercy.
As people, we all fall somewhere between these two poles in our approach to faith and our perception of Christ. Being more on one side or the other has its positive aspects, it can make us stronger or more compassionate, but each side can also hide our vices. In secretly favoring Christ as King, we may feel disgust for those aspects of the world that do not fit, the marginal, the wayward and the peripheral and it may push us to exclusively seeing the danger posed by those who stray from order.
In the opposite manner, by favoring Christ as crucified, in seeing Christ as the innocent victim, we may come to resent authority, oppose order while feeling entitled as we face what appears to us as tyrannical power. This may go to the point of accepting sin, of rejoicing in rebellion and disorder.
Considering this, St-Maximos links these extremes to our passions. The first is a passion from the Right, based in the smug attachment to our own self professed capacity for discipline and order. The other a passion of the Left, the fall into the chaos of our individual whims and desires:
“The passions of the flesh may be described as belonging to the left hand, self-conceit as belonging to the right hand.” [1]
It is important, especially in these dark times, to always keep these two images of Christ in view, like a balance with two arms, preventing one from tipping the other and checking the excesses of each. Keeping both images in mind can also act for us as a bulwark against adversity, for most critiques of Christianity are either of one or the other of these extremes. If the Nietzschian critique is that Christianity is a cesspool of resentment, victimhood and slave mentality, the feminist and post-modern critique has been that Christianity is the bastion of Patriarchy and oppression of the weak. But to view Christ, the one who is “all in all” is to view that he is both the master AND the slave, both the judge and the condemned innocent.
It is by understanding these two poles, that the excessive polarization of contemporary society can appear to us explicitly as Anti-Christ, for it is through the dividing of what is united without confusion, the radicalization of the Right and the Left hand which reduces them to their pathological states. As Christians we must strive to keep our hearts, to hold on to the center, so that we may continually see in these two icons – Christ Pantocrator and the Cross – how Christ’s outstretched hands reach from the highest Heaven to the depths of Hell.
——————————————-
[1] St-Maximos the Confessor, Fourth century, n.96 in the Philocalia.
By Jonathan Paggeau
There are two basic images of Christ in the Church, each marking one of the two poles which hold the very limits of the cosmos. The first image is that of the Pantocrator and its derivatives, essentially Christ shown in the guise of a glorious emperor, both the origin and the final judge of the world. The other basic image is that of Christ on the cross and its derivatives, where he is shown humiliated, beaten and crucified outside the great city as a vicious criminal despite his innocence.
The Pantocrator is an image of authority and power, with Christ appearing as the origin and culmination of all order. In the dome, the glorious Christ is the pinnacle of a cosmic hierarchy of angels and saints which gives structure and shape to the created. It is an image that inspires awe, pride and discipline. The Pantocrator, the great judge with the double edged sword coming from his mouth not only has the power to include, but also the power to exclude and marginalize. This is what order always does. Order, in fact any category, any “logos” or identity must both include and exclude.
Dome at Holy Ascension in Mount Pleasant, SC. Artists: . Vladimir Grygorenko and Dmitri Shkolnik
Yet standing at the other end of the cosmic expanse is the cross, the bridegroom, the burial and other images of Christ’s Passion in which Christ embodies the excluded and marginal space where order breaks down into death — where order, where law, can exclude and kill the innocent. It is an image that inspires compassion, pity and mercy.
As people, we all fall somewhere between these two poles in our approach to faith and our perception of Christ. Being more on one side or the other has its positive aspects, it can make us stronger or more compassionate, but each side can also hide our vices. In secretly favoring Christ as King, we may feel disgust for those aspects of the world that do not fit, the marginal, the wayward and the peripheral and it may push us to exclusively seeing the danger posed by those who stray from order.
In the opposite manner, by favoring Christ as crucified, in seeing Christ as the innocent victim, we may come to resent authority, oppose order while feeling entitled as we face what appears to us as tyrannical power. This may go to the point of accepting sin, of rejoicing in rebellion and disorder.
Considering this, St-Maximos links these extremes to our passions. The first is a passion from the Right, based in the smug attachment to our own self professed capacity for discipline and order. The other a passion of the Left, the fall into the chaos of our individual whims and desires:
“The passions of the flesh may be described as belonging to the left hand, self-conceit as belonging to the right hand.” [1]
It is important, especially in these dark times, to always keep these two images of Christ in view, like a balance with two arms, preventing one from tipping the other and checking the excesses of each. Keeping both images in mind can also act for us as a bulwark against adversity, for most critiques of Christianity are either of one or the other of these extremes. If the Nietzschian critique is that Christianity is a cesspool of resentment, victimhood and slave mentality, the feminist and post-modern critique has been that Christianity is the bastion of Patriarchy and oppression of the weak. But to view Christ, the one who is “all in all” is to view that he is both the master AND the slave, both the judge and the condemned innocent.
It is by understanding these two poles, that the excessive polarization of contemporary society can appear to us explicitly as Anti-Christ, for it is through the dividing of what is united without confusion, the radicalization of the Right and the Left hand which reduces them to their pathological states. As Christians we must strive to keep our hearts, to hold on to the center, so that we may continually see in these two icons – Christ Pantocrator and the Cross – how Christ’s outstretched hands reach from the highest Heaven to the depths of Hell.
——————————————-
[1] St-Maximos the Confessor, Fourth century, n.96 in the Philocalia.
Saint Patrick
Apostle of Ireland
Commemorated on March 17th
St. Patrick Apostle of Ireland, born at Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, in Scotland, in the year 387; died at Saul, Downpatrick, Ireland, 17 March, 493. Some sources say 460 or 461. --Ed.
He had for his parents Calphurnius and Conchessa. The former belonged to a Roman family of high rank and held the office of decurio in Gaul or Britain. Conchessa was a near relative of the great patron of Gaul, St. Martin of Tours. Kilpatrick still retains many memorials of Saint Patrick, and frequent pilgrimages continued far into the Middle Ages to perpetuate there the fame of his sanctity and miracles.
In his sixteenth year, Patrick was carried off into captivity by Irish marauders and was sold as a slave to a chieftan named Milchu in Dalriada, a territory of the present county of Antrim in Ireland, where for six years he tended his master's flocks in the valley of the Braid and on the slopes of Slemish, near the modern town of Ballymena. He relates in his "Confessio" that during his captivity while tending the flocks he prayed many times in the day: "the love of God", he added,
and His fear increased in me more and more, and the faith grew in me, and the spirit was roused, so that, in a single day, I have said as many as a hundred prayers, and in the night nearly the same, so that whilst in the woods and on the mountain, even before the dawn, I was roused to prayer and felt no hurt from it, whether there was snow or ice or rain; nor was there any slothfulness in me, such as I see now, because the spirit was then fervent within me.
In the ways of a benign Providence the six years of Patrick's captivity became a remote preparation for his future apostolate. He acquired a perfect knowledge of the Celtic tongue in which he would one day announce the glad tidings of Redemption, and, as his master Milchu was a druidical high priest, he became familiar with all the details of Druidism from whose bondage he was destined to liberate the Irish race.
Admonished by an angel he after six years fled from his cruel master and bent his steps towards the west. He relates in his "Confessio" that he had to travel about 200 miles; and his journey was probably towards Killala Bay and onwards thence to Westport. He found a ship ready to set sail and after some rebuffs was allowed on board. In a few days he was among his friends once more in Britain, but now his heart was set on devoting himself to the service of God in the sacred ministry. We meet with him at St. Martin's monastery at Tours, and again at the island sanctuary of Lérins which was just then acquiring widespread renown for learning and piety; and wherever lessons of heroic perfection in the exercise of Christian life could be acquired, thither the fervent Patrick was sure to bend his steps. No sooner had St. Germain entered on his great mission at Auxerre than Patrick put himself under his guidance, and it was at that great bishop's hands that Ireland's future apostle was a few years later promoted to the priesthood. It is the tradition in the territory of the Morini that Patrick under St. Germain's guidance for some years was engaged in missionary work among them. When Germain commissioned by the Holy See proceeded to Britain to combat the erroneous teachings of Pelagius, he chose Patrick to be one of his missionary companions and thus it was his privilege to be associated with the representative of Rome in the triumphs that ensued over heresy and Paganism, and in the many remarkable events of the expedition, such as the miraculous calming of the tempest at sea, the visit to the relics at St. Alban's shrine, and the Alleluia victory. Amid all these scenes, however, Patrick's thoughts turned towards Ireland, and from time to time he was favoured with visions of the children from Focluth, by the Western sea, who cried to him: "O holy youth, come back to Erin, and walk once more amongst us."
Pope St. Celestine I, who rendered immortal service to the Church by the overthrow of the Pelagian and Nestorian heresies, and by the imperishable wreath of honour decreed to the Blessed Virgin in the General Council of Ephesus, crowned his pontificate by an act of the most far-reaching consequences for the spread of Christianity and civilization, when he entrusted St. Patrick with the mission of gathering the Irish race into the one fold of Christ. Palladius had already received that commission, but terrified by the fierce opposition of a Wicklow chieftain had abandoned the sacred enterprise. It was St. Germain, Bishop of Auxerre, who commended Patrick to the pope. The writer of St. Germain's Life in the ninth century, Heric of Auxerre, thus attests this important fact: "Since the glory of the father shines in the training of the children, of the many sons in Christ whom St. Germain is believed to have had as disciples in religion, let it suffice to make mention here, very briefly, of one most famous, Patrick, the special Apostle of the Irish nation, as the record of his work proves. Subject to that most holy discipleship for 18 years, he drank in no little knowledge in Holy Scripture from the stream of so great a well-spring. Germain sent him, accompanied by Segetius, his priest, to Celestine, Pope of Rome, approved of by whose judgement, supported by whose authority, and strengthened by whose blessing, he went on his way to Ireland." It was only shortly before his death that Celestine gave this mission to Ireland's apostle and on that occasion bestowed on him many relics and other spiritual gifts, and gave him the name "Patercius" or "Patritius", not as an honorary title, but as a foreshadowing of the fruitfulness and merit of his apostolate whereby he became pater civium (the father of his people). Patrick on his return journey from Rome received at Ivrea the tidings of the death of Palladius, and turning aside to the neighboring city of Turin received episcopal consecration at the hands of its great bishop, St. Maximus, and thence hastened on to Auxerre to make under the guidance of St. Germain due preparations for the Irish mission.
It was probably in the summer months of the year 433, that Patrick and his companions landed at the mouth of the Vantry River close by Wicklow Head. The Druids were at once in arms against him. But Patrick was not disheartened. The intrepid missionary resolved to search out a more friendly territory in which to enter on his mission. First of all, however, he would proceed towards Dalriada, where he had been a slave, to pay the price of ransom to his former master, and in exchange for the servitude and cruelty endured at his hands to impart to him the blessings and freedom of God's children. He rested for some days at the islands off the Skerries coast, one of which still retains the name of Inis-Patrick, and he probably visited the adjoining mainland, which in olden times was known as Holm Patrick. Tradition fondly points out the impression of St. Patrick's foot upon the hard rock — off the main shore, at the entrance to Skerries harbour. Continuing his course northwards he halted at the mouth of the River Boyne. A number of the natives there gathered around him and heard with joy in their own sweet tongue the glad tidings of Redemption. There too he performed his first miracle on Irish soil to confirm the honour due to the Blessed Virgin, and the Divine birth of our Saviour. Leaving one of his companions to continue the work of instruction so auspiciously begun, he hastened forward to Strangford Loughand there quitting his boat continued his journey over land towards Slemish. He had not proceeded far when a chieftain, named Dichu, appeared on the scene to prevent his further advance. He drew his sword to smite the saint, but his arm became rigid as a statue and continued so until he declared himself obedient to Patrick. Overcome by the saint's meekness and miracles, Dichu asked for instruction and made a gift of a large sabhall (barn), in which the sacred mysteries were offered up. This was the first sanctuary dedicated by St. Patrick in Erin. It became in later years a chosen retreat of the saint. A monastery and church were erected there, and the hallowed site retains the name Sabhall (pronounced Saul) to the present day. Continuing his journey towards Slemish, the saint was struck with horror on seeing at a distance the fort of his old master Milchu enveloped in flames. The fame of Patrick's marvelous power of miracles preceeded him. Milchu, in a fit of frenzy, gathered his treasures into his mansion and setting it on fire, cast himself into the flames. An ancient record adds: "His pride could not endure the thought of being vanquished by his former slave".
Returning to Saul, St. Patrick learned from Dichu that the chieftains of Erin had been summoned to celebrate a special feast at Tara by Leoghaire, who was the Ard-Righ, that is, the Supreme Monarch of Ireland. This was an opportunity which Patrick would not forego; he would present himself before the assembly, to strike a decisive blow against the Druidism that held the nation captive, and to secure freedom for the glad tidings of Redemption of which he was the herald. As he journeyed on he rested for some days at the house of a chieftain named Secsnen, who with his household joyfully embraced the Faith. The youthful Benen, or Benignus, son of the chief, was in a special way captivated by the Gospel doctrines and the meekness of Patrick. Whilst the saint slumbered he would gather sweet-scented flowers and scatter them over his bosom, and when Patrick was setting out, continuing his journey towards Tara, Benen clung to his feet declaring that nothing would sever him from him. "Allow him to have his way", said St. Patrick to the chieftain, "he shall be heir to my sacred mission." Thenceforth Benen was the inseparable companion of the saint, and the prophecy was fulfilled, for Benen is named among the "comhards" or sucessors of St. Patrick in Armagh.
It was on 26 March, Easter Sunday, in 433, that the eventful assembly was to meet at Tara, and the decree went forth that from the preceeding day the fires throughout the kingdom should be extinguished until the signal blaze was kindled at the royal mansion. The chiefs and Brehons came in full numbers and the druids too would muster all their strength to bid defiance to the herald of good tidings and to secure the hold of their superstition on the Celtic race, for their demoniac oracles had announced that the messenger of Christ had come to Erin. St. Patrick arrived at the hill of Slane, at the opposite extremity of the valley from Tara, on Easter Eve, in that year the feast of the Annunciation, and on the summit of the hill kindled the Paschal fire. The druids at once raised their voice. "O King", (they said) "live for ever; this fire, which has been lighted in defiance of the royal edict, will blaze for ever in this land unless it be this very night extinguished." By order of the king and the agency of the druids, repeated attempts were made to extinguish the blessed fire and to punish with death the intruder who had disobeyed the royal command. But the fire was not extinguished and Patrick shielded by the Divine power came unscathed from their snares and assaults. On Easter Day the missionary band having at their head the youth Benignus bearing aloft a copy of the Gospels, and followed by St. Patrick who with mitre and crozier was arrayed in full episcopal attire, proceeded in processional order to Tara. The druids and magicians put forth all their strength and employed all their incantations to maintain their sway over the Irish race, but the prayer and faith of Patrick achieved a glorious triumph. The druids by their incantations overspread the hill and surrounding plain with a cloud of worse than Egyptian darkness. Patrick defied them to remove that cloud, and when all their efforts were made in vain, at his prayer the sun sent forth its rays and the brightest sunshine lit up the scene. Again by demoniac power the Arch-Druid Lochru, like Simon Magus of old, was lifted up high in the air, but when Patrick knelt in prayer the druid from his flight was dashed to pieces upon a rock.
Thus was the final blow given to paganism in the presence of all the assembled chieftains. It was, indeed, a momentous day for the Irish race. Twice Patrick pleaded for the Faith before Leoghaire. The king had given orders that no sign of respect was to be extended to the strangers, but at the first meeting the youthful Erc, a royal page, arose to show him reverence; and at the second, when all the chieftains were assembled, the chief-bard Dubhtach showed the same honour to the saint. Both these heroic men became fervent disciples of the Faith and bright ornaments of the Irish Church. It was on this second solemn occasion that St. Patrick is said to have plucked a shamrock from the sward, to explain by its triple leaf and single stem, in some rough way, to the assembled chieftains, the great doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. On that bright Easter Day, the triumph of religion at Tara was complete. The Ard-Righ granted permission to Patrick to preach the Faith throughout the length and breadth of Erin, and the druidical prophecy like the words of Balaam of old would be fulfilled: the sacred fire now kindled by the saint would never be extinguished.
The beautiful prayer of St. Patrick, popularly known as "St. Patrick's Breast-Plate", is supposed to have been composed by him in preparation for this victory over Paganism. The following is a literal translation from the old Irish text:
I bind to myself today
The strong virtue of the Invocation of the Trinity:
I believe the Trinity in the Unity
The Creator of the Universe.
I bind to myself today
The virtue of the Incarnation of Christ with His Baptism,
The virtue of His crucifixion with His burial,
The virtue of His Resurrection with His Ascension,
The virtue of His coming on the Judgement Day.
I bind to myself today
The virtue of the love of seraphim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the hope of resurrection unto reward,
In prayers of Patriarchs,
In predictions of Prophets,
In preaching of Apostles,
In faith of Confessors,
In purity of holy Virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.
I bind to myself today
The power of Heaven,
The light of the sun,
The brightness of the moon,
The splendour of fire,
The flashing of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of sea,
The stability of earth,
The compactness of rocks.
I bind to myself today
God's Power to guide me,
God's Might to uphold me,
God's Wisdom to teach me,
God's Eye to watch over me,
God's Ear to hear me,
God's Word to give me speech,
God's Hand to guide me,
God's Way to lie before me,
God's Shield to shelter me,
God's Host to secure me,
Against the snares of demons,
Against the seductions of vices,
Against the lusts of nature,
Against everyone who meditates injury to me,
Whether far or near,
Whether few or with many.
I invoke today all these virtues
Against every hostile merciless power
Which may assail my body and my soul,
Against the incantations of false prophets,
Against the black laws of heathenism,
Against the false laws of heresy,
Against the deceits of idolatry,
Against the spells of women, and smiths, and druids,
Against every knowledge that binds the soul of man.
Christ, protect me today
Against every poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against death-wound,
That I may receive abundant reward.
Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ at my right, Christ at my left,
Christ in the fort,
Christ in the chariot seat,
Christ in the poop [deck],
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
I bind to myself today
The strong virtue of an invocation of the Trinity,
I believe the Trinity in the Unity
The Creator of the Universe.
St. Patrick remained during Easter week at Slane and Tara, unfolding to those around him the lessons of Divine truth. Meanwhile the national games were being celebrated a few miles distant at Tailten (now Telltown) in connection with the royal feast. St. Patrick proceeding thither solemnly administered baptism to Conall, brother of the Ard-Righ Leoghaire, on Wednesday, 5 April. Benen and others had already been privately gathered into the fold of Christ, but this was the first public administering of baptism, recognized by royal edict, and hence in the ancient Irish Kalendars to the fifth of April is assigned "the beginning of the Baptism of Erin". This first Christian royal chieftain made a gift to Patrick of a site for a church which to the present day retains the name of Donagh-Patrick. The blessing of heaven was with Conall's family. St. Columba is reckoned among his descendants, and many of the kings of Ireland until the eleventh century were of his race. St. Patrick left some of his companions to carry on the work of evangelization in Meath, thus so auspiciously begun. He would himself visit the other territories. Some of the chieftains who had come to Tara were from Focluth, in the neighbourhood of Killala, in Connaught, and as it was the children of Focluth who in vision had summoned him to return to Ireland, he resolved to accompany those chieftains on their return, that thus the district of Focluth would be among the first to receive the glad tidings of Redemption. It affords a convincing proof of the difficulties that St. Patrick had to overcome, that though full liberty to preach the Faith throughout Erin was granted by the monarch of Leoghaire, nevertheless, in order to procure a safe conduct through the intervening territories whilst proceeding towards Connaught he had to pay the price of fifteen slaves. On his way thither, passing through Granard he learned that at Magh-Slecht, not far distant, a vast concourse was engaged in offering worship to the chief idol Crom-Cruach. It was a huge pillar-stone, covered with slabs of gold and silver, with a circle of twelve minor idols around it. He proceeded thither, and with his crosier smote the chief idol that crumbled to dust; the others fell to the ground. At Killala he found the whole people of the territory assembled. At his preaching, the king and his six sons, with 12,000 of the people, became docile to the Faith. He spent seven years visiting every district of Connaught, organizing parishes, forming dioceses, and instructing the chieftains and people.
On the occasion of his first visit to Rathcrogan, the royal seat of the kings of Connaught, situated near Tulsk, in the County of Roscommon, a remarkable incident occurred, recorded in many of the authentic narratives of the saint's life. Close by the clear fountain of Clebach, not far from the royal abode, Patrick and his venerable companions had pitched their tents and at early dawn were chanting the praises of the Most High, when the two daughters of the Irish monarch — Ethne, the fair, and Fedelm, the ruddy — came thither, as was their wont, to bathe. Astonished at the vision that presented itself to them, the royal maidens cried out: "Who are ye, and whence do ye come? Are ye phantoms, or fairies, or friendly mortals?" St. Patrick said to them: "It were better you would adore and worship the one true God, whom we announce to you, than that you would satisfy your curiosity by such vain questions." And then Ethne broke forth into the questions:
"Who is God?"
"And where is God?"
"Where is His dwelling?"
"Has He sons and daughters?"
"Is He rich in silver and gold?"
"Is He everlasting? is He beautiful?"
"Are His daughters dear and lovely to the men of this world?"
"Is He on the heavens or on earth?"
"In the sea, in rivers, in mountains, in valleys?"
"Make Him known to us. How is He to be seen?"
"How is He to be loved? How is He to be found?"
"Is it in youth or is it in old age that He may be found?"
But St. Patrick, filled with the Holy Ghost, made answer:
"God, whom we announce to you, is the Ruler of all things."
"The God of heaven and earth, of the sea and the rivers."
"The God of the sun, and the moon, and all the stars."
"The God of the high mountains and of the low-lying valleys."
"The God who is above heaven, and in heaven, and under heaven."
"His dwelling is in heaven and earth, and the sea, and all therein."
"He gives breath to all."
"He gives life to all."
"He is over all."
"He upholds all."
"He gives light to the sun."
"He imparts splendour to the moon."
"He has made wells in the dry land, and islands in the ocean."
"He has appointed the stars to serve the greater lights."
"His Son is co-eternal and co-equal with Himself."
"The Son is not younger than the Father."
"And the Father is not older than the Son."
"And the Holy Ghost proceeds from them."
"The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are undivided."
"But I desire by Faith to unite you to the Heavenly King, as you are daughters of an earthly king."
The maidens, as if with one voice and one heart, said: "Teach us most carefully how we may believe in the Heavenly King; show us how we may behold Him face to face, and we will do whatsoever you shall say to us."
And when he had instructed them he said to them: "Do you believe that by baptism you put off the sin inherited from the first parents."
They answered: "We believe."
"Do you believe in penance after sin?"
"We believe."
"Do you believe in life after death?" Do you believe in resurrection on the Day of Judgement?"
"We believe."
"Do you believe in the unity of the Church?"
"We believe."
Then they were baptized, and were clothed in white garments. And they besought that they might behold the face of Christ. And the saint said to them: "You cannot see the face of Christ unless you taste death, and unless you receive the Sacrifice." They answered: "Give us the Sacrifice, so that we may be able to behold our Spouse." And the ancient narrative adds: "when they received the Eucharist of God, they slept in death, and they were placed upon a couch, arrayed in their white baptismal robes."
In 440 St. Patrick entered on the special work of the conversion of Ulster. Under the following year, the ancient annalists relate a wonderful spread of the Faith throughout the province. In 444 a site for a church was granted at Armagh by Daire, the chieftain of the district. It was in a valley at the foot of a hill, but the saint was not content. He had special designs in his heart for that district, and at length the chieftain told him to select in his territory any site he would deem most suitable for his religious purpose. St. Patrick chose that beautiful hill on which the old cathedral of Armagh stands. As he was marking out the church with his companions, they came upon a doe and fawn, and the saint's companions would kill them for food; but St. Patrick would not allow them to do so, and, taking the fawn upon his shoulders, and followed by the doe, he proceeded to a neighbouring hill, and laid down the fawn, and announced that there, in future times, great glory would be given to the Most High. It was precisely upon that hill thus fixed by St. Patrick that, a few years ago, there was solemnly dedicated the new and beautiful Catholic cathedral of Armagh. A representative of the Holy See presided on the occasion, and hundreds of priests and bishops were gathered there; and, indeed, it might truly be said, the whole Irish race on that occasion offered up that glorious cathedral to the Most High as tribute to their united faith and piety, and their never-failing love of God.
From Ulster St. Patrick probably proceeded to Meath to consolidate the organization of the communities there, and thence he continued his course through Leinster. Two of the saint's most distinguished companions, St. Auxilius and St. Iserninus, had the rich valley of the Liffey assigned to them. The former's name is still retained in the church which he founded at Killossy, while the latter is honoured as the first Bishop of Kilcullen. As usual, St. Patrick's primary care was to gather the ruling chieftains into the fold. At Naas, the royal residence in those days, he baptised two sons of the King of Leinster. Memorials of the saint still abound in the district — the ruins of the ancient church which he founded, his holy well, and the hallowed sites in which the power of God was shown forth in miracles. At Sletty, in the immediate neighborhood of Carlow, St. Fiacc, son of the chief Brehon, Dubthach, was installed as bishop, and for a considerable time that see continued to be the chief centre of religion for all Leinster. St. Patrick proceeded through Gowran into Ossory; here he erected a church under the invocation of St. Martin, near the present city of Kilkenny, and enriched it with many precious relics which he had brought from Rome. It was in Leinster, on the borders of the present counties of Kildare and Queen's, that Odhran, St. Patrick's charioteer, attained the martyr's crown. The chieftain of that district honoured the demon-idol, Crom Cruach, with special worship, and, on hearing of that idol being cast down, vowed to avenge the insult by the death of our apostle. Passing through the territory, Odhran overheard the plot that was being organized for the murder of St. Patrick, and as they were setting out in the chariot to continue their journey, asked the saint, as a favour, to take the reins, and to allow himself, for the day, to hold the place of honour and rest. This was granted, and scarcely had they set out when a well-directed thrust of a lance pierced the heart of the devoted charioteer, who thus, by changing places, saved St. Patrick's life, and won for himself the martyr's crown.
St. Patrick next proceeded to Munster. As usual, his efforts were directed to combat error in the chief centres of authority, knowing well that, in the paths of conversion, the kings and chieftains would soon be followed by their subjects. At "Cashel of the Kings" he was received with great enthusiasm, the chiefs and Brehons and people welcoming him with joyous acclaim. While engaged in the baptism of the royal prince Aengus, son of the King of Munster, the saint, leaning on his crosier, pierced with its sharp point the prince's foot. Aengus bore the pain unmoved. When St. Patrick, at the close of the ceremony, saw the blood flow, and asked him why he had been silent, he replied, with genuine heroism, that he thought it might be part of the ceremony, a penalty for the joyous blessings of the Faith that were imparted. The saint admired his heroism, and, taking the chieftain's shield, inscribed on it a cross with the same point of the crozier, and promised that that shield would be the signal of countless spiritual and temporal triumphs.
Our apostle spent a considerable time in the present County of Limerick. The fame of his miracles and sanctity had gone before him, and the inhabitants of Thomond and northern Munster, crossing the Shannon in their frail coracles, hastened to receive his instruction. When giving his blessing to them on the summit of the hill of Finnime, looking out on the rich plains before him, he is said to have prophesied the coming of St. Senanus: "To the green island in the West, at the mouth of the sea [i.e., Inis-Cathaigh, now Scattery Island, at the mouth of the Shannon, near Kilrush], the lamp of the people of God will come; he will be the head of counsel to all this territory." At Sangril (now Singland), in Limerick, and also in the district of Gerryowen, the holy wells of the saint are pointed out, and the slab of rock, which served for his bed, and the altar on which every day he offered up the Holy Sacrifice. On the banks of the Suit, and the Blackwater, and the Lee, wherever the saint preached during the seven years he spent in Munster, a hearty welcome awaited him. The ancient Life attests: "After Patrick had founded cells and churches in Munster, and had ordained persons of every grade, and healed the sick, and resuscitated the dead, he bade them farewell, and imparted his blessing to them." The words of this blessing, which is said to have been given from the hills of Tipperary, as registered in the saint's Life, to which I have just referred, are particularly beautiful:
A blessing on the Munster people --
Men, youths, and women;
A blessing on the land
That yields them fruit.
A blessing on every treasure
That shall be produced on their plains,
Without any one being in want of help,
God's blessing be on Munster.
A blessing on their peaks,
On their bare flagstones,
A blessing on their glens,
A blessing on their ridges.
Like the sand of the sea under ships,
Be the number in their hearths;
On slopes, on plains,
On mountains, on hills, a blessing.
St. Patrick continued until his death to visit and watch over the churches which he had founded in all the provinces in Ireland. He comforted the faithful in their difficulties, strengthened them in the Faith and in the practice of virtue, and appointed pastors to continue his work among them. It is recorded in his Life that he consecrated no fewer than 350 bishops. He appointed St. Loman to Trim, which rivalled Armagh itself in its abundant harvest of piety. St. Guasach, son of his former master, Milchu, became Bishop of Granard, while the two daughters of the same pagan chieftan founded close by, at Clonbroney, a convent of pious virgins, and merited the aureola of sanctity. St. Mel, nephew of our apostle, had the charge of Ardagh; St. MacCarthem, who appears to have been patricularly loved by St. Patrick, was made Bishop of Clogher. The narrative in the ancient Life of the saint regarding his visit to the district of Costello, in the County of Mayo, serves to illustrate his manner of dealing with the chieftains. He found, it says, the chief, Ernasc, and his son, Loarn, sitting under a tree, "with whom he remained, together with his twelve companions, for a week, and they received from him the doctrine of salvation with attentive ear and mind. Meanwhile he instructed Loarn in the rudiments of learning and piety." A church was erected there, and, in after years, Loarn was appointed to its charge.
The manifold virtues by which the early saints were distinguished shone forth in all their perfection in the life of St. Patrick. When not engaged in the work of the sacred ministry, his whole time was spent in prayer. Many times in the day he armed himself with the sign of the Cross. He never relaxed his penitential exercises. Clothed in a rough hair-shirt, he made the hard rock his bed. His disinterestedness is specially commemorated. Countless converts of high rank would cast their precious ornaments at his feet, but all were restored to them. He had not come to Erin in search of material wealth, but to enrich her with the priceless treasures of the Catholic Faith.
From time to time he withdrew from the spiritual duties of his apostolate to devote himself wholly to prayer and penance. One of his chosen places of solitude and retreat was the island of Lough Derg, which, to our own day, has continued to be a favourite resort of pilgrims, and it is known as St. Patrick's Purgatory. Another theatre of his miraculous power and piety and penitential austerities in the west of Ireland merits particular attention. In the far west of Connaught there is a range of tall mountains, which, arrayed in rugged majesty, bid defiance to the waves and storms of the Atlantic. At the head of this range arises a stately cone in solitary grandeur, about 4000 feet in height, facing Clew Bay, and casting its shadow over the adjoining districts of Aghagower and Westport. This mountain was known in pagan times as the Eagle Mountain, but ever since Ireland was enlightened with the light of Faith it is known as Croagh Patrick, i.e. St. Patrick's mountain, and is honoured as the Holy Hill, the Mount Sinai, of Ireland.
St. Patrick, in obedience to his guardian angel, made this mountain his hallowed place of retreat. In imitation of the great Jewish legislator on Sinai, he spent forty days on its summit in fasting and prayer, and other penitential exercises. His only shelter from the fury of the elements, the wind and rain, the hail and snow, was a cave, or recess, in the solid rock; and the flagstone on which he rested his weary limbs at night is still pointed out. The whole purpose of his prayer was to obtain special blessings and mercy for the Irish race, whom he evangelized. The demons that made Ireland their battlefield mustered all their strength to tempt the saint and disturb him in his solitude, and turn him away, if possible, from his pious purpose. They gathered around the hill in the form of vast flocks of hideous birds of prey. So dense were their ranks that they seemed to cover the whole mountain, like a cloud, and they so filled the air that Patrick could see neither sky nor earth nor ocean. St. Patrick besought God to scatter the demons, but for a time it would seem as if his prayers and tears were in vain. At length he rang his sweet-sounding bell, symbol of his preaching of the Divine truths. Its sound was heard all over the valleys and hills of Erin, everywhere bringing peace and joy. The flocks of demons began to scatter. He flung his bell among them; they took to precipitate flight, and cast themselves into the ocean. So complete was the saint's victory over them that, as the ancient narrative adds, "for seven years no evil thing was to be found in Ireland."
The saint, however, would not, as yet, descend from the mountain. He had vanquished the demons, but he would now wrestle with God Himself, like Jacob of old, to secure the spiritual interests of his people. The angel had announced to him that, to reward his fidelity in prayer and penance, as many of his people would be gathered into heaven as would cover the land and sea as far as his vision could reach. Far more ample, however, were the aspirations of the saint, and he resolved to persevere in fasting and prayer until the fullest measure of his petition was granted. Again and again the angel came to comfort him, announcing new concessions; but all these would not suffice. He would not relinquish his post on the mountain, or relax his penance, until all were granted. At length the message came that his prayers were heard:
- many souls would be free from the pains of purgatory through his intercession;
- whoever in the spirit of penance would recite his hymn before death would attain the heavenly reward;
- barbarian hordes would never obtain sway in his Church;
- seven years before the Judgement Day, the sea would spread over Ireland to save its people from the temptations and terrors of the Antichrist; and
- greatest blessing of all, Patrick himself should be deputed to judge the whole Irish race on the last day.
It is sometimes supposed that St. Patrick's apostolate in Ireland was an unbroken series of peaceful triumphs, and yet it was quite the reverse. No storm of persecution was, indeed stirred up to assail the infant Church, but the saint himself was subjected to frequent trials at the hands of the druids and of other enemies of the Faith. He tells us in his "Confessio" that no fewer than twelve times he and his companions were seized and carried off as captives, and on one occasion in particular he was loaded with chains, and his death was decreed. But from all these trials and sufferings he was liberated by a benign Providence. It is on account of the many hardships which he endured for the Faith that, in some of the ancient Martyrologies, he is honoured as a martyr.
St. Patrick, having now completed his triumph over Paganism, and gathered Ireland into the fold of Christ, prepared for the summons to his reward. St. Brigid came to him with her chosen virgins, bringing the shroud in which he would be enshrined. It is recorded that when St. Patrick and St. Brigid were united in their last prayer, a special vision was shown to him. He saw the whole of Ireland lit up with the brightest rays of Divine Faith. This continued for centuries, and then clouds gathered around the devoted island, and, little by little, the religious glory faded away, until, in the course of centuries, it was only in the remotest valleys that some glimmer of its light remained. St. Patrick prayed that the light would never be extinguished, and, as he prayed, the angel came to him and said: "Fear not: your apostolate shall never cease." As he thus prayed, the glimmering light grew in brightness, and ceased not until once more all the hills and valleys of Ireland were lit up in their pristine splendour, and then the angel announced to St. Patrick: "Such shall be the abiding splendour of Divine truth in Ireland."
At Saul (Sabhall), St. Patrick received the summons to his reward on 17 March, 493 [See note above — Ed.]. St. Tassach administered the last sacraments to him. His remains were wrapped in the shroud woven by St. Brigid's own hands. The bishops and clergy and faithful people from all parts crowded around his remains to pay due honour to the Father of their Faith. Some of the ancient Lives record that for several days the light of heaven shone around his bier. His remains were interred at the chieftan's Dun or Fort two miles from Saul, where in after times arose the cathedral of Down.
Writings of St. Patrick
The "Confessio" and the "Epistola ad Coroticum" are recognized by all modern critical writers as of unquestionable genuineness. The best edition, with text, translation, and critical notes, is by Rev. Dr. White for the Royal Irish Academy, in 1905. The 34 canons of a synod held before the year 460 by St. Patrick, Auxilius, and Isserninus, though rejected by Todd and Haddan, have been placed by Professor Bury beyond the reach of controversy. Another series of 31 ecclesiastical canons entitled "Synodus secunda Patritii", though unquestionably of Irish origin and dating before the close of the seventh century, is generally considered to be of a later date than St. Patrick. Two tracts (in P.L., LIII), entitled "De abusionibus saeculi", and "De Tribus habitaculis", were composed by St. Patrick in Irish and translated into Latin at a later period. Passages from them are assigned to St. Patrick in the "Collectio Hibernensis Canonum", which is of unquestionable authority and dates from the year 700 (Wasserschleben, 2nd ed., 1885). This "Collectio Hibernensis" also assigns to St. Patrick the famous synodical decree: "Si quae quaestiones in hac insula oriantur, ad Sedem Apostolicam referantur." (If any difficulties arise in this island, let them be referred to the Apostolic See). The beautiful prayer, known as "Faeth Fiada", or the "Lorica of St. Patrick" (St. Patrick's Breast-Plate), first edited by Petrie in his "History of Tara", is now universally accepted as genuine. The "Dicta Sancti Patritii", or brief sayings of the saint, preserved in the "Book of Armagh", are accurately edited by Fr. Hogan, S.J., in "Documenta de S. Patritio" (Brussels, 1884). The old Irish text of "The Rule of Patrick" has been edited by O'Keeffe, and a translation by Archbishop Healy in the appendix to his Life of St. Patrick (Dublin, 1905). It is a tract of venerable antiquity, and embodies the teaching of the saint.
Sources
The Trias thaumaturga (gol., Louvain, 1647) of of the Franciscan COLGAN is the most completecollection of the ancient Lives of the saint. The Kemare Life of Saint Patrick (CUSACK, Dublin, 1869) presents from the pen of HENNESSY the translation of the Irish Tripartite Life, with copious notes. WHITLEY STOKES, in the Rolls Series (London, 1887), has given the textand translation of the Vita Tripartita, together with many original documents from the Book of Armagh and other sources. The most noteworthy works of later years are SHEARMAN, Loca Patriciana (Dublin, 1879); TODD, St. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland (Dublin, 1864); BURY, Life of St. Patrick (London, 1905); HEALY, The Life and Writings of St. Patrick (Dublin, 1905).
One or Two?
by Dr. Peter Jones
An ideology is taking over the West that is both very spiritual and self-consciously anti-Christian. It intends, ever so subtly, without ever saying so explicitly, to grind the gospel into the dustbin of history. The 1960s was an incredibly formative decade. In 1962, Mircea Eliade, the world expert on comparative religions, observed: “Western thought [he meant Christendom] can no longer maintain itself in this splendid isolation from a confrontation with the ‘unknown,’ the ‘outsiders.’” As if on cue, the “Fab Four” met the Maharishi and introduced the “wisdom of the East” to popular Western culture. In the same decade, the “Death of God” theology arose, which turned out not to be the final triumph of secular humanism over the God of the Bible but instead the arrival of “the new polytheism” in the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. Bob Dylan sang, “The Times They Are A’Changin,” and we heard for the first time of the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” an age of pagan utopian spirituality. This was the age when many became aware of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism through the discovery of ancient Gnostic texts and the psychological theories of the modern, very spiritual Gnostic Carl Jung, who called Christian orthodoxy “systematic blindness.” Jung followed the ancient Gnostic god Abraxas, half man, half beast, as a deity higher than both the Christian God and the Devil. His secular biographer recently stated that Jung, like the Roman Emperor Julian in the fourth century AD, succeeded in turning the Western world back to paganism.
The results of this pagan invasion of the West are stunning. In August 2009, Newsweek announced that “we are all Hindus now,” meaning that the Western “Christian” soul has been profoundly and definitively altered by Eastern spiritual one-ism, the seductive message of which is bound up in the Hindu word advaita, meaning “not two.” Here is the massive clash of two fundamentally opposed worldviews. Whereas Scripture affirms two-ism (the Creator/creature distinction and all the distinctions God creates in the cosmos He made), Hindu one-ism categorically affirms that things are “not two” but “one.” In a cosmos without a Creator, all distinctions collapse and man is god.
The conversion of the West has had practical effects. California is now mandating, in the name of oneist fairness, that gay history must be taught in all the schools, including grade school. The effect on Christian teachers will be devastating. If they leave, we hand over public education to the pagans. The same is happening in the military chaplaincy, just the way it happened in the fourth century under Julian the Apostate, who turned the empire back to Isis worship and purged Christians from the imperial administration.
Pagan territory is new for us. The theological binary (two-ism) is being ineluctably undermined by the rejection of the normative male/female binary. In a Swedish, tax-funded preschool, teachers can no longer use the pronouns him or her and must address the children as “friends.” “Homophobic,” gender-specific children’s stories such as “Thumbelina” or “Cinderella” are forbidden. A Toronto couple is raising their baby, Storm, without telling anyone the child’s gender.
While only 1.4 percent of the U.S. population claims a same-sex orientation (see the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 2011), this minuscule tail wags the massive dog of Western culture because the agenda of homosexual oneness fits the “new ideology” of advaita — “not two.”
The one-ism of secular environmentalism is capturing the mind of the rising generation, raised in grade school through college on the notion of “sustainability” that worships Mother Earth and flattens the difference between creatures made in God’s image and those that are not.
What will happen to gospel witness when Western culture is “purified” of its literary canon and its Christian ethical past? The church must still speak and live out all issues of fundamental truth, whatever the cost — not to save America but to save souls from eternal doom. Without a clear understanding of the biblical worldview of two-ism — especially without the unambiguous embodiment of gender distinctions — as part of the image of God, we lose the essence of who we are as human beings, and the gospel loses its clarity.
It is time for people everywhere to hear that the good news concerns the amazing grace of reconciliation with God, the great Other, who, while transcendently different from us, redeems sinful creatures like us and restores to us personal fellowship with Him through the atoning death of His Son.
The Pagan Agenda of the Code
by Peter Jones
As I lecture around the world on the Da Vinci Code, a typical response is to tell me to relax, enjoy the book as a fun read of fiction, and move on. Let me say that it is indeed a “fun” read, that it is fiction — but like many works of fiction, it has a deep ideological agenda, suggesting that “relaxation” is hardly the appropriate response. But neither is panic or ignorance. Someone recently spoke about the debt we owe to heresy, because error opens up discussions about the truth — and no Christian can be against that!
The agenda of The Da Vinci Code is revealed clearly by Tim Freke, author of an equally radical book on Jesus, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God? When interviewed about the significance of Brown’s novel, he said, “People are looking for and hoping for a new interpretation of Christianity.”
At a time when the rejection of Christian spirituality, from the 1960s on, has succeeded in dislodging traditional Christian belief from its position of long-term dominance, an interest in alternate spirituality has exploded. Like no other modern art form (except Star Wars, perhaps), Brown has raised to the level of public consciousness what is really a deep, often subterranean strand of esoteric, anti-theistic religious tradition that constitutes the spiritual underbelly of Western history and draws its strength from the great public religions of the East. What is new is to call this spirituality, with breath-taking audacity, both new and also the original form of Christianity. It is actually, like ancient Gnosticism, the paganization of Christianity. His new-look Christianity involves the adoption of “harmless,” “pre-Christian” symbols that, he claims, early Christianity rejected to its own detriment.
Brown speaks innocuously of the “the simplicity of the circle.” However, the circle is a fundamentally pagan symbol. In ancient Egyptian religion, the symbol of the circle defined by the sun represents the all-inclusiveness of nature. Brown knows this and includes the description of a Templar church as “pantheonically [polytheistically] pagan,” a “perfectly circular church in honor of the sun.” Specifically, the circle is the classic, pagan expression of monism, the great philosophical theory of oneness, according to which everything is in the circle and everything shares the same substance. This all-inclusive circle automatically eliminates the God of biblical orthodoxy. There is nothing “harmless” about that.
Brown also wants modern believers to adopt the pentagram, the five-pointed star often found within the circle, as a pre-Christian symbol referring not to satanism but to nature’s perfection. However, the truth is that the pentagram is one of the most potent, powerful, and persistent symbols in human religious history, totally absent from the Bible. It has been found scratched on the walls of neolithic caves and in Babylonian drawings. It is the favored symbol of Pythagoreans, Free-masons, Gnostics, Kabalists, magicians, Wiccans and satanists.
A version of the pentagram is the figure of Baphomet, the five-pointed, goat-headed, goat-footed hermaphroditic, winged man with women’s breasts that Brown proposes to recuperate as a harmless symbol of androgynous sexuality and wisdom. This, though, is not innocent, since on one occasion Brown actually speaks of “the pagan god…Baphomet.”
Baphomet in Western religious history was understood as a form of the Devil, and it is thus not surprising that Anton LaVey in the 1960s established Baphomet as the sign of the present church of Satan. However, like many modern liberals, such as Elaine Pagel’s The Origin of Satan, Brown wants us to believe that Satan was an invention by late Jews and Christians to demonize their opponents.
In Brown’s world, if there is no Satan, there is no ultimate personal evil, no ultimate truth or falsehood, no original sin, no divine Savior, just a spiritual circle that includes everyone. Another symbol, appearing on virtually every other page of the novel, is the Goddess or the sacred feminine. Often known as the Great Mother, she is one of the most powerful symbols of the pagan occult. For Brown, she is the true meaning of the Holy Grail. Joseph Campbell, guru to George Lucas, states that “the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity is not something ruling over and above a fallen nature.” Her circular womb envelops everything and renders everything divine. This goddess pantheism can be found in all the non-Christian religions, even where her name is not always mentioned — witchcraft, Hinduism, American Indian shamanism, and in peace-loving Buddhism.
These elements, presented as seemingly innocuous practices of well-meaning sophisticated people, ancient and modern, are actually coded invitations to the serious involvement in the age-old rituals of pagan thinking and spirituality, worshiping nature as god. This pagan spirituality is at the heart of contemporary religious syncretism, which, for Brown, is the great goal of religion.
If you want to understand the deep code of The Da Vinci Code look at the hard-to-miss clue found in the description of the architecture of Rosslyn Chapel, a Templar chapel outside Edinburgh, which Brown, with calculated effect, christens “the Cathedral of Codes”: “Each block [of the chapel] was carved with a symbol…to create a multifaceted surface…Christian cruciforms, Jewish stars, Masonic seals, Templar crosses, cornucopias, pyramids, astrological signs, plants, vegetables, pentacles and roses.… Rosslyn Chapel was a shrine to all faiths…to all traditions…and, above all, to nature and the goddess.”
Here are the symbols of all the religions blended together to give us a new-look inclusive “Christianity” where all the distinctives of biblical Christianity — God the creator, original sin, Christ the divine Savior, His cross and resurrection, in a word, the Gospel — have been consistently and deliberately eliminated, and worship is directed to her occultic Ladyship. It is important to see that Brown’s novel is neither a piece of harmless fiction nor a neutral, objective restatement of the historical “facts” of early Christianity. His massive ideological agenda colors everything he writes. People need to see that this is unashamedly a propaganda piece for a new spirituality Brown has recently embraced, for which he has become a modern and most effective missionary.
Why all the interest around this novel? Because Brown is touching the major ideological fissure in contemporary American and Western culture, that of the fading traditionalist Christian culture of the past and that of the rising neo-pagan spirituality of America’s and the planet’s “bright” globalist future.
We can deplore the success of this anti-orthodox Christian propaganda, race up the nearest mountain and wait for the rapture. Or close our eyes, go to church, and hope it all goes away. But the “lie” always calls forth a statement of “the truth.” Actually, Brown “gives permission” to raise the question of spirituality and provides a wonderful occasion for evangelism, when evangelism in the postmodern world seemed to be going out of style.
Understanding the deep code of The Da Vinci Code gives us the occasion to promote a responsible theological answer to the neo-pagan threat in our time and to point people to the truth. Failing to respond, we risk becoming a mere footnote in contemporary religious history. May God grant us a revival of true faith, clear thinking, and courageous witness in these difficult yet fascinating times.
Peter Jones: Paganism in Today’s Culture
The Dragons that Almost Exist
By Jonathan Pageau
Explaining the icon of St-George slaying the dragon to a 4 year old is amazing. Explaining the icon of St-George to a 10 year old is excruciating — “Yeah, but dragons don’t exist, do they?”.
Do they?
When someone tells you that dragons don’t exist or that monsters don’t exist, what is it they are saying? When gazing at the icon of St-George, which intuitively has to be one of the most satisfying icons to gaze upon, it reveals a truth so profound that despite the fact that “dragons don’t exist”, it is still one of the most popular icons and St-George is one of the most popular saints.
When we say “dragons don’t exist”, usually what is meant by “exist” is some kind of measurable, reproducible phenomena. “Dragon” then becomes a zoological specie, like a dog or a cat that could be separated into sub-species, bred and genetically modified. But to believe that such measurable categories in the world are the only ones that “exist” is not only untrue to the highest degree, but it is also an image of the mental tyranny of our scientific age that anyone could be so blind to believe this as they live out their lives.
What if dragons or else monsters in general are simply not the same type of “thing” as dogs or cats or apples? What if the way a dragon exists has less to do with the difference between a tiger and a rabbit and more to do with the difference between a friend and a stranger? The difference between a friend and a stranger is not a measurable, reproducible phenomenon, yet it is one of the most real experiences a human being has. A friend is a real category of existence, but there is no “zoological” friend, that is I cannot point to someone that would quantify “friend” for all the world in the way a cat is a cat for everyone. Friend is a category of human engagement. And in a similar vein, encountering a stranger is encountering an undefined person, we could say the undecided in human form. I would like to suggest that a dragon and more generally a monster, is the category of the unknown itself in animal form. Ultimately a dragon is an image of chaos, the place where knowledge and categories reach their limits.
That a dragon is an image of chaos is not a new idea, it has been proposed by thinkers from extremely diverse areas, including Orthodox ones. But usually it is implied in saying things like “dragons are an image of chaos” that dragons are a kind of fable, a kind of metaphor. I am saying dragons exist, or rather almost exist. They are as real as a stranger is real, as an alien is real, real in ways that show us the very limits of existence itself. It is silly, for example, to say that UFOs do not exist. Of course UFOs exist, they are unidentified flying objects. Now the way we portray, imagine and project certain cultural forms and narratives into these UFOs is another matter, an important one which shows us how humans engage with the chaos and the unknown. Just like we can experience a UFO or a stranger, we can definitely come into contact with a dragon. And I think the story of St-George and many other traditional stories of dragons are built, are constructed in a manner that helps us understand “what” a dragon is. This is the reason the story of St-George perdures despite all the myth busters trying to take it down.
But we need to give the myth busters their due. So now, just as a thought experiment, imagine a terrible dragon threatening a city and eating its children. St-George comes and kills it. Imagine now a scientist arriving with all his instruments to dissect it. After several weeks of analysis and peer-reviewed data, the scientist informs the silly people of the town via some academic journal, that the dragon was not a dragon, but rather it was a giant siamese-twin crocodile(s) with elephantiasis and rabies. The paper is quite long, in fact it details how each deformity on the giant siamese-twin crocodile(s) with elephantiasis and rabies is related either to it being siamese, it having elephantiasis or rather having come with time from its own violent self-destructive behavior due to its rabies. Some scientists begin to argue over the cause of certain of the deformities and soon someone holds a conference and the organizers publish a book stating the different views on the matter.
The question is this: which is more real, the dragon or the giant siamese-twin crocodile(s) with elephantiasis and rabies? The giant siamese-twin crocodile(s) with elephantiasis and rabies does not properly account for the terrifying experience of monstrosity, and though the dragon has been dissected and tamed in a way, the experience, the narrative which impacted the very identity of that village is an encounter with a dragon. And also, it would be absurd to rewrite our zoological categories to make way for the exceptional category of the siamese-twin crocodile(s) with elephantiasis and rabies. Just stick with dragons.
In the icon of St-George, the dragon is shown as an impossible hybrid, combining mammals, lizards and birds. As I have explained elsewhere, hybridity is the chaos which appears on the limits, in the in-betweens of categories, the exceptions. It is the very experience of the monster. The strange and exceptional are very important things and are categories which include many spiritual mysteries. Strangers in the Bible and in our tradition can secretly either be angels or devils. In the story of Abraham, the three strangers which come to him are angels and an image of the Trinity, but in the traditions surrounding the Nativity, the unknown shepherd tempting St-Joseph is secretly a devil. This is the nature of the ambiguous, it can hide either extremes.
Sadly in a world of only taxonomic categories, there is no room for the peripheral, the exception and the strange. Everything must fit, or else. This has caused both the mad permissiveness and unilateral openness as well as the totalitarian identity of absolute exclusion which characterize the duality of modernity. Both extremes cause each other and so can only swing from one impossible extreme to the next, either attempting to account for and justify every exception or else tracing an absolute border between us and them. In such a world there is no other option, either everything must fit, or else Occam’s razor comes a slicing. But in a world with room for dragons, the natural hierarchy of being is allowed to both include the rule and leave an undefined space for the strange and exceptional, the monster even. There the dragon can almost exist.
As long as the dragon does not eat our children. And there are those of us now who intuit that the dragons have started to devour children.
Luckily we will always have St-George to protect us.
Thoughts From The Wood Pile
By Hieromonk Michael Nelson Tree
Chief Joseph (Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it) once said "Truth needs few words." The reality is that in the modern context of War Against Truth under the Dictatorship of Relativism and the Age of Deceit, we as Christians are faced with Christ's expectation to proclaim and explain The Truth to the larger American society, as well as the world at large. Christians need to be watchmen and watch women on the tower, and courageously speak up on The Truth of Jesus Christ, as proclaimed by our Blessed Lord in the Gospel.
Now the many words to explain the few words which Chief Joseph mentioned above:
Water, pure clean water.
Water the essence of life.
Water the symbol of Sacredness and the Holy Spirit.
All life depends on water.
No one has the right to dirty or deny water to another human being.
No one has the right to threaten waters’ cleanness which insures the physical survival and security of future generations.
It would seem an easy thing to see the sacredness of pure clean water. It would also seem clear to all rational people that keeping water clean is more important than the very rich people becoming even richer, at the expense of other's health and our children’s future.
Yet, under the current climate of cut throat materialism, of blatant adversity and contempt against the Truth of Christ, common sense and the Golden Rule very often do not apply; they are trampled upon with contempt for anything sacred.
Everything about water is sacred. We are blessed by it, and we give blessings with it.
In the Christian Church water is a fundamental part of the Sacrament of Baptism, and the indwelling life of the Spirit. It is a part of the transcendent Glory of The Creator- Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka.
The idea that it is unacceptable to baptize with polluted water does not even crosses the mind of the ones who pollutes it. For they are so far removed from the very basics of compassion and empathy and from the understanding of water’s sacredness. To them, water is a mere commodity to be done with in whatever way they choose.
It is our place therefore, as the people of Christ, to keep the body of Christ undefiled.
It is why I call out to you to pray for the people of Standing Rock North Dakota, which came to unintended and unasked for national attention in the Dakota Access Pipeline Incident .
Whenever you drink, think about the People of Standing Rock!
For this little thought of yours, is a little prayer prayed for them.
All they are doing is wanting to drink clean water, have clean water for their children and ensure clean water and the survival of their children’s children.
They are simply trying to protect the water; for this action they are being demonized, lied about, and their very lives threatened.
I have been struggling with the idea of how to ask the members of the Society of Jesus Christ to pray for the Standing Rock situation. Not because more people are needed to rally for somebody's agenda or cause, but simply because you are people of deep prayer and peace.
It is not my way to disturb this peace. The Holy Spirit in me urges me to ask, and the Holy Spirit indwelling on other human beings and all life, has asked me to ask you. So, I ask you to pray deep prayers and thus assist our brothers and sisters of Standing Rock in any way you are called to do so.
These people live, pray and walk in the Holy Spirit. The people of Standing Rock are not aggressive. They are among the poorest of the poor. They ask only for God’s clean water to drink, and that water remains clean for future.
To protect the water, the People of Standing Rock ND, are forced to speak out.
The purity and justness of their action has caused a great gathering of people, and it grows greater every day.
The National Guard has been placed at road blocks to stop the supporters.
So there you have it: the poor unarmed people with meager supplies standing up for clean water and the future.
They are standing empty handed against the rich and powerful, paid police, and security guards, the ferocious dogs with bloody noses smeared by human blood, and the National Guard who is heavily armed.
People standing for their future, pitted against people fighting for their jobs, by those who have little care or elementary respect for any of them, much less for the basic human dignity of their families or the future generations.
There is so much to the “Dakota Pipeline” issue (as it has been called), but I do not wish you to join the fray.
Nevertheless I would like you to perceive what underlies this heroic resistance of The Native American People and pray that the situation may change for better.
The one thing/aspect that underlies this situation is that someone, somehow, has the idea they have the right to impinge on other people’s life, liberty, and peace, because of their own evil agenda and greed.
There is a diabolical spirit of superiority at work at Standing Rock fighting against the Native People, spirit that has disrespect for all human beings- or worse-a lack of respect for the entirety of God’s Creation.
Therefore I humbly ask for your prayers, not so much for the oppressed (for even the rich are oppressed by their greed!), but I request your prayers for the enlightenment of all people.
If the Holy Spirit would be given the freedom to send the enlightenment of respect and love for God’s creation in all hearts and for all people, then pipelines like the North Dakota one would never even start to begin with, and fracking would not even be considered. For water is life, and life is sacred.
As one Native American said once:
“Sympathy to the cause for the world is appreciated, but what the world truly needs is respect!”
A Prayer for Standing Rock:
I pray all people are safe,
That all are enlightened to the respect of God’s creation and the love of all its people.
May all walk in a sacred way.
May the Holy Spirit reveal the way.
With and through Christ the Lord. Amen.
More about the North Dakota Pipeline Issue can be found by accessing this link:
http://rezpectourwater.com/
By Hieromonk Michael Nelson Tree
Chief Joseph (Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it) once said "Truth needs few words." The reality is that in the modern context of War Against Truth under the Dictatorship of Relativism and the Age of Deceit, we as Christians are faced with Christ's expectation to proclaim and explain The Truth to the larger American society, as well as the world at large. Christians need to be watchmen and watch women on the tower, and courageously speak up on The Truth of Jesus Christ, as proclaimed by our Blessed Lord in the Gospel.
Now the many words to explain the few words which Chief Joseph mentioned above:
Water, pure clean water.
Water the essence of life.
Water the symbol of Sacredness and the Holy Spirit.
All life depends on water.
No one has the right to dirty or deny water to another human being.
No one has the right to threaten waters’ cleanness which insures the physical survival and security of future generations.
It would seem an easy thing to see the sacredness of pure clean water. It would also seem clear to all rational people that keeping water clean is more important than the very rich people becoming even richer, at the expense of other's health and our children’s future.
Yet, under the current climate of cut throat materialism, of blatant adversity and contempt against the Truth of Christ, common sense and the Golden Rule very often do not apply; they are trampled upon with contempt for anything sacred.
Everything about water is sacred. We are blessed by it, and we give blessings with it.
In the Christian Church water is a fundamental part of the Sacrament of Baptism, and the indwelling life of the Spirit. It is a part of the transcendent Glory of The Creator- Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka.
The idea that it is unacceptable to baptize with polluted water does not even crosses the mind of the ones who pollutes it. For they are so far removed from the very basics of compassion and empathy and from the understanding of water’s sacredness. To them, water is a mere commodity to be done with in whatever way they choose.
It is our place therefore, as the people of Christ, to keep the body of Christ undefiled.
It is why I call out to you to pray for the people of Standing Rock North Dakota, which came to unintended and unasked for national attention in the Dakota Access Pipeline Incident .
Whenever you drink, think about the People of Standing Rock!
For this little thought of yours, is a little prayer prayed for them.
All they are doing is wanting to drink clean water, have clean water for their children and ensure clean water and the survival of their children’s children.
They are simply trying to protect the water; for this action they are being demonized, lied about, and their very lives threatened.
I have been struggling with the idea of how to ask the members of the Society of Jesus Christ to pray for the Standing Rock situation. Not because more people are needed to rally for somebody's agenda or cause, but simply because you are people of deep prayer and peace.
It is not my way to disturb this peace. The Holy Spirit in me urges me to ask, and the Holy Spirit indwelling on other human beings and all life, has asked me to ask you. So, I ask you to pray deep prayers and thus assist our brothers and sisters of Standing Rock in any way you are called to do so.
These people live, pray and walk in the Holy Spirit. The people of Standing Rock are not aggressive. They are among the poorest of the poor. They ask only for God’s clean water to drink, and that water remains clean for future.
To protect the water, the People of Standing Rock ND, are forced to speak out.
The purity and justness of their action has caused a great gathering of people, and it grows greater every day.
The National Guard has been placed at road blocks to stop the supporters.
So there you have it: the poor unarmed people with meager supplies standing up for clean water and the future.
They are standing empty handed against the rich and powerful, paid police, and security guards, the ferocious dogs with bloody noses smeared by human blood, and the National Guard who is heavily armed.
People standing for their future, pitted against people fighting for their jobs, by those who have little care or elementary respect for any of them, much less for the basic human dignity of their families or the future generations.
There is so much to the “Dakota Pipeline” issue (as it has been called), but I do not wish you to join the fray.
Nevertheless I would like you to perceive what underlies this heroic resistance of The Native American People and pray that the situation may change for better.
The one thing/aspect that underlies this situation is that someone, somehow, has the idea they have the right to impinge on other people’s life, liberty, and peace, because of their own evil agenda and greed.
There is a diabolical spirit of superiority at work at Standing Rock fighting against the Native People, spirit that has disrespect for all human beings- or worse-a lack of respect for the entirety of God’s Creation.
Therefore I humbly ask for your prayers, not so much for the oppressed (for even the rich are oppressed by their greed!), but I request your prayers for the enlightenment of all people.
If the Holy Spirit would be given the freedom to send the enlightenment of respect and love for God’s creation in all hearts and for all people, then pipelines like the North Dakota one would never even start to begin with, and fracking would not even be considered. For water is life, and life is sacred.
As one Native American said once:
“Sympathy to the cause for the world is appreciated, but what the world truly needs is respect!”
A Prayer for Standing Rock:
I pray all people are safe,
That all are enlightened to the respect of God’s creation and the love of all its people.
May all walk in a sacred way.
May the Holy Spirit reveal the way.
With and through Christ the Lord. Amen.
More about the North Dakota Pipeline Issue can be found by accessing this link:
http://rezpectourwater.com/
The Wild Flower Bishop
By Hieromonk Michael Nelson Tree
There once was a Church with many ideas of how to worship the Lord, and there were many gardeners
in the Church; these gardeners were bishops. Each bishop liked a particular type of flower and grew
it in a part of the Church of their choosing, the part of the Church which they sought best for taht particular flower.
All the bishops agreed in general that all flowers in God's creation needed to be taken care of. Howver secretly, almost all bishops thought some of the other bishops's flowers were nothing more than weeds and should be destroyed root and stem.
Despite this situation, the Church was always in bloom with one kind of flower or another. People would remark how beautiful the Church was, and indeed She really was! When many of the different flowers were in bloom, the Church was glittering in God's majesty! It was stunning!
As always happens, occasionally a flower of another kind would find itself growing in the flower bed of a diffrent bishop, being misplaced. There were some bishops who were kind and gentile; they would look for the bishop who had a similar flower and ask them if they would take care of the misplaced flower. Some bishops would take the orphaned flower in howver others would not and wold threaten to cut and destroy the misplaced flower.
Growing all flowers was time consuming, nut especially growing the orphaned ones. With much effort the orphan flower would be put in a place it could happily grow among other flowers of its kind. In the flower world and the Garden of theChurch all flowers would remark how kind, loving and understanding their bishops were to them.
Some bishops however, were not so kind and thoughtful. They would uproot the misplaced flowers and
throw them outside the garden. Other bishops would even purposely walk over the flowers, because to
them they were no more than ugly weeds that should be eliminated from the Church all together.
There was one bishop in particular who studied about all kinds of flowers for many years, and had learned a great deal about all the different flowers in the Creator's Garden. He understood how they differed and what specific environments they needed in order to be able to grow and flourish in God's Holy Light.
But alas, his garden was the smallest of all! It had only a conglomeration of wild flowers that he had gathered from the surrounding country side: they were native to the land. Truly this bishop loved the wild native flowers as much as the special "civilized" flowers. Of course, most all the other bishops scoffed at his garden, how little it was, and considered it little more than a plot of weeds to be gotten rid of.
The Wildflower Bishop, was a bishop in the true sense of the word; he was exceptionally learned, and devout to Godm and His Church Garden. The other Bishops were reluctantly respectful of him and some were envious. A very odd thing about this learned and pious bishop is that he truly loved the many different flowers, and when he would find uprooted and crushed flowers lying outside the other bishop's gardens in the merciless sun, he would take them to the surrounding country side plant them and water them. He knew exactly what conditions they needed to grow and altough they were in terrible shape at first, they usually took root and flourished. The bishop did this for many years, and the country side was filled with various flowers originally discarded by other bishops. A heavenly smell filled the air of the countriside.
Sometimes this bishop would be confronted by other bishops for taking what they considered to be "weeds" and for salvaging them. In turn, he would point to the other bishops's cruelty towards misplaced and orphan flowers. He was both praised by the bishops that saw all flowers as flowers, and frimly condemned by those who saw some flowers as weeds.
In some point such a great commotion came from the fiery disagreement on what is a flower, and what is a weed, that the confusion and discord caused the Church building to fall into disrepair. The Church's very walls were shuttered and some parts of the Church colapsed alltoghether!
Years passed and eventually all the bishops died and stood together looking down on their shattered and ruined buildings. They were all ashamed of what had happened; how could they explain the ruined Church to God The
Great Mystery?! The bishops stood before The Great Mystery and then came the dreaded question: “Who is responsible for this”?!
All the bishop's hearts sank as they squabbled among each other to find the responsibles for this sad state of affairs in the Church Garden. No one wanted to be held accountable for the colapse of the Church Garden's walls. Each wanted to blame the other bishop and they all turned against each other. Finally they pointed at the Wildflower Bishop who they all agree to blame. Was he not the one who started everything by confronting the bishops and sowing confusion in the Church Garden and by replanting some of the discarded flowers in the countryside against "The Gardening Manual" and the rules?! It was the Wildflower Bishop who was responsible, not themselves, they concluded!
The Great Mystery asked the Wildflower Bishop if he accepted these acusations and responsabiluty for the disrepair of the Church Garden. The Wildflower Bishop humbly and even fearfully said “yes, I accept the responsibility for what has happened to the Church garden”. The Great Mystery said to the Wildflower Bishop: “Good, then you shall be my Gardener in the afterlife”.
The other bishops were amazed, and one said, “Look at what has happened to the Church?!”
The Great Mystery said “Yes, how wonderful She is! Look at all Her beauty from horizon to horizon. Look at how all the flowers give glory to the Creator and bring beauty to the Bride of Christ. Look and see how diverse and how harmonious all those colors and kinds of flowers are, and how they live together in peace unity. Well done, my servant Bishop!"
Shocked, one bishop cried out in despair: “But the Garden's walls, what about the Garden's walls?!”
The Great Mystery replied, “You mean that pile of wood and stones covered by wild weeds?! No, my Garden and my true gardners are elsewhere not within your crumbled buildings and walls. ”
The above is inspired from a Native American story being told in a Native American story telling manner.
Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ: Physics and the Existence of God
What is missing from Aronofsky’s Noah
By Jonathan Paggeau
In many of my past articles I have explored the symbolism of death and how it is related in the Bible and by our Tradition to the arts and technology, to hybridity and the foreigner, the serpent, to the cave, to Cain, to animality and to periphery in general. Aranofsky’s recent Noah movie deals intently with many of these same images, and in seeing the often confused and bewildered reactions it has garnered, I am only confirmed in my imperative to make this symbolism more available.Aronofsky’s Noah is a Jewish movie. It is imbued with a rabbinical approach to the Bible by interpretation through storytelling. It is a very rich vision of the story of Noah, one which boldly takes on the silly literalism of American Christianity and dares to suggest that the Bible is actually about something, manifests something, and is not simply a string of accurate stories that document God’s intervention in the world. Traditional Christians should not be afraid of this. Our liturgy, our traditions, our icons are full of extra-Biblical material and details which act as interpretation, pointing to the meaning of what is already in the Bible. For example, when we say that the skull of Adam was buried under the cross of Christ and that his blood ran down upon it, this is not just some odd historical detail about the crucifixion which is not in the Bible, rather it is a detail that is already interpreting for us what the crucifixion does. Often our apocryphal stories are more fabulous, more miraculous than the Bible, and we are capable of accepting parts of them with different levels of traditional authority while rejecting or arguing over other details from the very same stories. We live with these, we discuss, accept, reject these because our purpose as a Church is not to be “Biblicaly accurate”, but to participate in the transfiguration of creation through the Holy Spirit. In a similar manner, this type of interpretation through storytelling is what Aronofsky’s Noah is doing.
Yet Aronofsky’s Noah is not a Christian movie. It is powerful, rich and complex in its symbolic structures, but there is a crucial element missing in its symbolism, and that is what I want to attract attention to.
Rock Monsters
Let’s start with the toughest part, the rock monsters. In the movie, the fallen angels are represented as huge rock-monsters. This has been an unending source of criticism for the movie. In the Bible and in tradition, there are many suggestions that the cause of the flood, or at least part of its cause is the result of fallen angels, fallen angels that have somehow mingled with men. In the Bible, there is a reference to a mingling, understood as a sexual transgression between the higher and the lower, between the sons of God and the daughters of men. There are two traditional interpretations of this mingling, one is that it represents the mingling of the descendants of Seth with the descendants of Cain. The other is that Angels fell to earth through desire for women and their unnatural relationship caused the giants. In the Enochian tradition, this intermingling of angels and men is also the source of technology, the angels teach men the arts and crafts, modification of nature which is seen as perversion of nature and it is these perversions which lead to the flood. The way to understand this in our own world is that the higher things, spiritual things, truth itself can be denatured and create monsters when they are applied inappropriately, when they “fall”. There is a truth in a nuclear weapon, a truth of God, but this truth has fallen into a monstrous body.
In Genesis, Adam is made by God with dirt/dust and spirit/breath. The result of this perfect union of the substances of the lowest (dirt = earth) with the highest (spirit = heaven) creates a glorious body, a body represented in the movie as golden using a symbolism the Orthodox are quite used to when we think of the halo. Considering this Biblical image, it is quite powerful that in this movie, the fallen angels appear as an improper union of the heavenly (here represented by light) and the earthly. Instead of Adam’s luminous body, the rock bodies are deformed and incomplete. Like the Jewish Golem, they become dark cavernous shells, prisons for the faintly perceivable glory hidden within. And it is these monsters who teach Cain’s descendants how to mine the earth and create cities, iron, all those things the Cain’s line are attributed with in the Bible. They do this to help men, but it turns against them and Cain’s descendants destroy the earth. In the movie, the final representative of the Cain’s line is Tubal Cain who is credited in the Bible of having created metallurgy. The image of iron related to Tubal Cain is important. The first thing Tubal Cain gives Ham (the future cursed son of Noah) to attract him is an iron war hammer/axe, the same hammer/axe Tubal Cain uses as a blacksmith. In this the very symbol of the tool is linked to the weapon, just as the traditional image of Cain changing his till into a spear. Finally the giants use their knowledge to help Noah build the ark, and in this we see the first glimpse of the duality of the supplement, the idea of death and the combating of death by death. We see that both the cause and the solution of the crisis originates in the same place. Finally the rock-monsters are transformed, their “light” is liberated when they they flip things around again, turn against Tubal Cain, acting like a peripheral defense of the ark when it is being attacked, and doing this by brandishing huge iron chains. Iron against iron.
By Jonathan Paggeau
In many of my past articles I have explored the symbolism of death and how it is related in the Bible and by our Tradition to the arts and technology, to hybridity and the foreigner, the serpent, to the cave, to Cain, to animality and to periphery in general. Aranofsky’s recent Noah movie deals intently with many of these same images, and in seeing the often confused and bewildered reactions it has garnered, I am only confirmed in my imperative to make this symbolism more available.Aronofsky’s Noah is a Jewish movie. It is imbued with a rabbinical approach to the Bible by interpretation through storytelling. It is a very rich vision of the story of Noah, one which boldly takes on the silly literalism of American Christianity and dares to suggest that the Bible is actually about something, manifests something, and is not simply a string of accurate stories that document God’s intervention in the world. Traditional Christians should not be afraid of this. Our liturgy, our traditions, our icons are full of extra-Biblical material and details which act as interpretation, pointing to the meaning of what is already in the Bible. For example, when we say that the skull of Adam was buried under the cross of Christ and that his blood ran down upon it, this is not just some odd historical detail about the crucifixion which is not in the Bible, rather it is a detail that is already interpreting for us what the crucifixion does. Often our apocryphal stories are more fabulous, more miraculous than the Bible, and we are capable of accepting parts of them with different levels of traditional authority while rejecting or arguing over other details from the very same stories. We live with these, we discuss, accept, reject these because our purpose as a Church is not to be “Biblicaly accurate”, but to participate in the transfiguration of creation through the Holy Spirit. In a similar manner, this type of interpretation through storytelling is what Aronofsky’s Noah is doing.
Yet Aronofsky’s Noah is not a Christian movie. It is powerful, rich and complex in its symbolic structures, but there is a crucial element missing in its symbolism, and that is what I want to attract attention to.
Rock Monsters
Let’s start with the toughest part, the rock monsters. In the movie, the fallen angels are represented as huge rock-monsters. This has been an unending source of criticism for the movie. In the Bible and in tradition, there are many suggestions that the cause of the flood, or at least part of its cause is the result of fallen angels, fallen angels that have somehow mingled with men. In the Bible, there is a reference to a mingling, understood as a sexual transgression between the higher and the lower, between the sons of God and the daughters of men. There are two traditional interpretations of this mingling, one is that it represents the mingling of the descendants of Seth with the descendants of Cain. The other is that Angels fell to earth through desire for women and their unnatural relationship caused the giants. In the Enochian tradition, this intermingling of angels and men is also the source of technology, the angels teach men the arts and crafts, modification of nature which is seen as perversion of nature and it is these perversions which lead to the flood. The way to understand this in our own world is that the higher things, spiritual things, truth itself can be denatured and create monsters when they are applied inappropriately, when they “fall”. There is a truth in a nuclear weapon, a truth of God, but this truth has fallen into a monstrous body.
In Genesis, Adam is made by God with dirt/dust and spirit/breath. The result of this perfect union of the substances of the lowest (dirt = earth) with the highest (spirit = heaven) creates a glorious body, a body represented in the movie as golden using a symbolism the Orthodox are quite used to when we think of the halo. Considering this Biblical image, it is quite powerful that in this movie, the fallen angels appear as an improper union of the heavenly (here represented by light) and the earthly. Instead of Adam’s luminous body, the rock bodies are deformed and incomplete. Like the Jewish Golem, they become dark cavernous shells, prisons for the faintly perceivable glory hidden within. And it is these monsters who teach Cain’s descendants how to mine the earth and create cities, iron, all those things the Cain’s line are attributed with in the Bible. They do this to help men, but it turns against them and Cain’s descendants destroy the earth. In the movie, the final representative of the Cain’s line is Tubal Cain who is credited in the Bible of having created metallurgy. The image of iron related to Tubal Cain is important. The first thing Tubal Cain gives Ham (the future cursed son of Noah) to attract him is an iron war hammer/axe, the same hammer/axe Tubal Cain uses as a blacksmith. In this the very symbol of the tool is linked to the weapon, just as the traditional image of Cain changing his till into a spear. Finally the giants use their knowledge to help Noah build the ark, and in this we see the first glimpse of the duality of the supplement, the idea of death and the combating of death by death. We see that both the cause and the solution of the crisis originates in the same place. Finally the rock-monsters are transformed, their “light” is liberated when they they flip things around again, turn against Tubal Cain, acting like a peripheral defense of the ark when it is being attacked, and doing this by brandishing huge iron chains. Iron against iron.
Popular representation of the Golem of Prague, who according to folklore was animated by Rabbi Loew to defend the the Jewish community of the city of Prague. The fallen angels use a similar symbolism in their monstrous rock bodies.
Death and duality
The duality of death is presented very powerfully in the movie. I have written many times about this duality, about the paradox of its consequences. We are shown the garden of Eden and the tree of Knowledge/Life is in fact two trees crossing each other. As Eve tastes the fruit, Adam is “distracted” and looks to the ground to touch the dead skin left by the serpent who has shed it (the word used to describe the serpent in the Bible which is usually translated as “crafty” also means “naked”). And so the fall is presented as this lowering towards death. We know that Adam picks up this “garment of skin”, as this skin is passed down through the descendants of Seth. The skin is wrapped around the arm and used to bless the succeeding generations. This wrapping around the arm suggests of course the tefillin, the leather strap used by Jews to bind the law to their body as a memorial (Exodus 13:9, Deut. 6:8, 11:18), but it also suggests the serpent wrapped around the pole/tree which represents this duality of death, and which I have spoken of elsewhere (The Serpents of Orthodoxy). And so the duality is powerfully brought forth, because when Tubal Cain sneaks into the ark with the help of Ham, it is with this same animal skin that Tubal-Cain will curse Ham in the the final moments in the Ark. So the serpent, that is death, is both a source of blessing and of curse. The duality of Noah and Tubal Cain.
One of the biggest errors in approaching the Noah movie is to want Noah to be the “good guy”, to want him to be the “hero”. This error is also made by some upon reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament. All the human characters in the OT have a dark side, none of them are “the good guy”. Understanding this will help us see things we could not see otherwise and it will help us avoid undue emotion when the character we want to be the “the good guy” does things we do not agree with. We need to see Noah and Tubal Cain as two extremes, two opposites, somewhat as I have explained about the left and the right hand. Noah is the “servant” of nature. He only gathers what he needs from the earth, he does not eat meat, he does not build cities, he does not even farm. He has integrity to a fault. He is like a radical Greenpeace vegetarian ecologist who despises the “carbon footprint” left by man. Noah even chides his son for picking a single wildflower from a hill. Tubal Cain “dominates” nature. He is passionate, powerful and preaches human will. He eats raw meat with blood, digs mines, makes cities, weapons and war. He is like a gas-guzzling, gun-toting industrialist who hates those hippy idealistic tree-huggers. Many people have been annoyed by the portrayal of Noah (especially the gas-guzzling gun-toters), but just as it is Tubal Cain’s excessive approach to the role of Man and creation which has led him to do anything necessary to preserve his lineage, so also it is Noah’s excessive attitude towards creation, this excessive diminution of Man which leads him to believe he should kill his own family. Noah doesn’t just want to circumcise Man, he wants to castrate him. Both go too far.
There is in fact a very powerful scene in the movie, in the very moment where Noah wants to kill his family to eliminate Man from the earth. Hidden in the Ark, Tubal Cain has a surprising speech in which he uses the very words of the Bible to say that God put man in the Garden to have dominion over creation. He does this as he bites the head of a living reptile, extinguishing forever that species to assure his own survival. In this moment, both men are shown in their extreme, where they are both right in some way, both wrong in another, but pulled into the radical consequence of their opposition.
What is Missing
This movie understands very well the duality of the world of the fall and death and though it attempts to present one side as being better (Noah’s side), it cannot avoid its own logic in bringing the duality to both its suicidal extremes. So what is missing from this movie? What is missing is the one who is in between Noah and Tubal Cain. What is missing is the Lord who washes his followers’ feet, the King who dies for his subjects, the Shepherd whose sheep obey his voice, but who also gives his life for those very sheep. What is missing is the one who can unite the blood of Tubal Cain with the wine of Noah, who can unite the Garden of Eden with the Heavenly City, who can both die and conquer all at once.
This missing link could also have mended one of the most disturbing aspects of the story. In the movie, the angels fall by compassion, not by desire or pride as is usually posited in our Tradition. This is a very grave inversion. In a similar fashion, when Noah does not kill his granddaughters, it is understood by him as a transgression, as a sin of compassion. How can this be? The real question should be: how can we understand the golden sparks of heaven trapped in the world of the Fall, that world where the Garden is lost and Adam’s glorious body is tarnished? If we see these hidden sparks of divinity coming down by compassion, as a condescension from on high, can we conceive this compassion as anything else but a fall from above, as a breaking of the divine law of Justice, a transgression of the absolute division between Heaven and Earth? It is only in the Incarnation of Christ that these problems can be solved, only in a perfect union without confusion of two fully distinct Divine and Human natures into one single person. In this, the duality of Heaven and Earth is resolved without being annulled, and the glory of Adam’s body is restored at an even higher level than in the Garden. In this we do not have to understand the descent of the influence of Heaven or even technology and the arts as necessarily fallen and monstrous. Rather, when all these descents “remember” their heart, their origin, they can be transfigured, not into dis-incarnated light, but into “resurrected” shining bodies.
And so I think that Aronofsky’s Noah is a powerful movie, because we live in a world that has indeed forgotten the possibility of the Incarnation, a world that has been abandoned to its extremes and Man’s disregard for God’s creation is one of the symptoms of this accelerated Fall. Noah is also a powerful movie because it dives into the symbolic fabric of the Biblical story, the type of symbolism that I will continue to expound in my future articles. The only thing missing is what makes all one, a vision of Christ, the vision of the heart.
Source: http://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/what-is-missing-from-aronofskys-noah/
The duality of death is presented very powerfully in the movie. I have written many times about this duality, about the paradox of its consequences. We are shown the garden of Eden and the tree of Knowledge/Life is in fact two trees crossing each other. As Eve tastes the fruit, Adam is “distracted” and looks to the ground to touch the dead skin left by the serpent who has shed it (the word used to describe the serpent in the Bible which is usually translated as “crafty” also means “naked”). And so the fall is presented as this lowering towards death. We know that Adam picks up this “garment of skin”, as this skin is passed down through the descendants of Seth. The skin is wrapped around the arm and used to bless the succeeding generations. This wrapping around the arm suggests of course the tefillin, the leather strap used by Jews to bind the law to their body as a memorial (Exodus 13:9, Deut. 6:8, 11:18), but it also suggests the serpent wrapped around the pole/tree which represents this duality of death, and which I have spoken of elsewhere (The Serpents of Orthodoxy). And so the duality is powerfully brought forth, because when Tubal Cain sneaks into the ark with the help of Ham, it is with this same animal skin that Tubal-Cain will curse Ham in the the final moments in the Ark. So the serpent, that is death, is both a source of blessing and of curse. The duality of Noah and Tubal Cain.
One of the biggest errors in approaching the Noah movie is to want Noah to be the “good guy”, to want him to be the “hero”. This error is also made by some upon reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament. All the human characters in the OT have a dark side, none of them are “the good guy”. Understanding this will help us see things we could not see otherwise and it will help us avoid undue emotion when the character we want to be the “the good guy” does things we do not agree with. We need to see Noah and Tubal Cain as two extremes, two opposites, somewhat as I have explained about the left and the right hand. Noah is the “servant” of nature. He only gathers what he needs from the earth, he does not eat meat, he does not build cities, he does not even farm. He has integrity to a fault. He is like a radical Greenpeace vegetarian ecologist who despises the “carbon footprint” left by man. Noah even chides his son for picking a single wildflower from a hill. Tubal Cain “dominates” nature. He is passionate, powerful and preaches human will. He eats raw meat with blood, digs mines, makes cities, weapons and war. He is like a gas-guzzling, gun-toting industrialist who hates those hippy idealistic tree-huggers. Many people have been annoyed by the portrayal of Noah (especially the gas-guzzling gun-toters), but just as it is Tubal Cain’s excessive approach to the role of Man and creation which has led him to do anything necessary to preserve his lineage, so also it is Noah’s excessive attitude towards creation, this excessive diminution of Man which leads him to believe he should kill his own family. Noah doesn’t just want to circumcise Man, he wants to castrate him. Both go too far.
There is in fact a very powerful scene in the movie, in the very moment where Noah wants to kill his family to eliminate Man from the earth. Hidden in the Ark, Tubal Cain has a surprising speech in which he uses the very words of the Bible to say that God put man in the Garden to have dominion over creation. He does this as he bites the head of a living reptile, extinguishing forever that species to assure his own survival. In this moment, both men are shown in their extreme, where they are both right in some way, both wrong in another, but pulled into the radical consequence of their opposition.
What is Missing
This movie understands very well the duality of the world of the fall and death and though it attempts to present one side as being better (Noah’s side), it cannot avoid its own logic in bringing the duality to both its suicidal extremes. So what is missing from this movie? What is missing is the one who is in between Noah and Tubal Cain. What is missing is the Lord who washes his followers’ feet, the King who dies for his subjects, the Shepherd whose sheep obey his voice, but who also gives his life for those very sheep. What is missing is the one who can unite the blood of Tubal Cain with the wine of Noah, who can unite the Garden of Eden with the Heavenly City, who can both die and conquer all at once.
This missing link could also have mended one of the most disturbing aspects of the story. In the movie, the angels fall by compassion, not by desire or pride as is usually posited in our Tradition. This is a very grave inversion. In a similar fashion, when Noah does not kill his granddaughters, it is understood by him as a transgression, as a sin of compassion. How can this be? The real question should be: how can we understand the golden sparks of heaven trapped in the world of the Fall, that world where the Garden is lost and Adam’s glorious body is tarnished? If we see these hidden sparks of divinity coming down by compassion, as a condescension from on high, can we conceive this compassion as anything else but a fall from above, as a breaking of the divine law of Justice, a transgression of the absolute division between Heaven and Earth? It is only in the Incarnation of Christ that these problems can be solved, only in a perfect union without confusion of two fully distinct Divine and Human natures into one single person. In this, the duality of Heaven and Earth is resolved without being annulled, and the glory of Adam’s body is restored at an even higher level than in the Garden. In this we do not have to understand the descent of the influence of Heaven or even technology and the arts as necessarily fallen and monstrous. Rather, when all these descents “remember” their heart, their origin, they can be transfigured, not into dis-incarnated light, but into “resurrected” shining bodies.
And so I think that Aronofsky’s Noah is a powerful movie, because we live in a world that has indeed forgotten the possibility of the Incarnation, a world that has been abandoned to its extremes and Man’s disregard for God’s creation is one of the symptoms of this accelerated Fall. Noah is also a powerful movie because it dives into the symbolic fabric of the Biblical story, the type of symbolism that I will continue to expound in my future articles. The only thing missing is what makes all one, a vision of Christ, the vision of the heart.
Source: http://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/what-is-missing-from-aronofskys-noah/
The Serpents of Orthodoxy
By Jonathan Paggeau
One of the most surprising images one is faced with considering Orthodox liturgical symbolism is the bishop’s staff sporting two snakes flanking a small cross atop it. Especially in a Protestant North American context, this image seems to hark back to ancient chthonian cults, more a wizard’s magic staff than anything Christian. As I have been doing for other subjects, I would like to take a trip through iconography, through the Bible and other traditions to show how this symbol is all at once thoughtful, powerful and perfectly orthodox in the broadest sense. It also happens to fit nicely with all I have been writing for the OAJ up till now.
The first hurdle we must overcome is the perception that the Western bishop’s staff, the crosier, is really a shepherd’s staff, whereas the Orthodox have this strange snake bearing object. In fact, for a millennia at least, the western crosier was also identified with a serpent as medieval crosiers attest. We could say that there are two basic shapes, the crosier and the “tau” shaped staff which were present in the Church before the Schism, both of these shapes have been interpreted with serpents. The current Orthodox version of the staff with serpents (as seen above with Bishop Vladimir Sokolovsky) is a variation of these models.
We wonder though, how can such an image of serpents, both in the East and West be appropriate for the very symbol of a Bishop’s authority? Many will point to the Biblical story of the bronze serpent, somehow prefiguring Christ, as the basis for this use of serpents on the bishop’s staff. This is a perfectly sound explanation, though it is insufficient to create a complete picture. If we are to look a Moses as the origin of this image, we should look earlier. The very first time we encounter a staff in the Bible, at least a staff that is related to divine authority, is at the burning bush. When Moses doubts the Pharaoh will listen to him, God tells him:
“What is that in your hand?” He said, “A rod.” And He said, “Cast it on the ground.” So he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from it. 4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail” (and he reached out his hand and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand), Exodus 4: 1-3
The very first time we encounter a staff of divine authority, it is immediately linked to a serpent. Here we find a first example of the “shiftiness” of the snake symbol, of its dual nature. In the story of Moses and pharaoh there are two origins of the serpents. We know that Pharaoh’s magicians could produce the same miracle, and so both sides make serpents from staffs, a “good” serpent and a “bad” serpent. The good one eats the bad one.
The shiftiness, the double sided aspect of the serpent symbol appears also in the story of the bronze serpent on several levels. The Israelites had been plagued by serpents, and to save them from the poisonous bites, God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and to put it on a staff. Whoever would look to the bronze serpent would be healed, yet those refusing to do so would die of their snake bite. In terms of duality, we can see clearly here how the serpent is both the disease and cure. Looking to the serpent that was “raised up” will cure one from those serpents that bite “down below”, just as an antidote is made from the poison or a vaccine is made from the disease. Another way to see the duality in the story is how this serpent that was raised up as a healing device, will later be “cast down” by the virtous king Hezekiah for having become an idol (2 Kings 18:4).
By Jonathan Paggeau
One of the most surprising images one is faced with considering Orthodox liturgical symbolism is the bishop’s staff sporting two snakes flanking a small cross atop it. Especially in a Protestant North American context, this image seems to hark back to ancient chthonian cults, more a wizard’s magic staff than anything Christian. As I have been doing for other subjects, I would like to take a trip through iconography, through the Bible and other traditions to show how this symbol is all at once thoughtful, powerful and perfectly orthodox in the broadest sense. It also happens to fit nicely with all I have been writing for the OAJ up till now.
The first hurdle we must overcome is the perception that the Western bishop’s staff, the crosier, is really a shepherd’s staff, whereas the Orthodox have this strange snake bearing object. In fact, for a millennia at least, the western crosier was also identified with a serpent as medieval crosiers attest. We could say that there are two basic shapes, the crosier and the “tau” shaped staff which were present in the Church before the Schism, both of these shapes have been interpreted with serpents. The current Orthodox version of the staff with serpents (as seen above with Bishop Vladimir Sokolovsky) is a variation of these models.
We wonder though, how can such an image of serpents, both in the East and West be appropriate for the very symbol of a Bishop’s authority? Many will point to the Biblical story of the bronze serpent, somehow prefiguring Christ, as the basis for this use of serpents on the bishop’s staff. This is a perfectly sound explanation, though it is insufficient to create a complete picture. If we are to look a Moses as the origin of this image, we should look earlier. The very first time we encounter a staff in the Bible, at least a staff that is related to divine authority, is at the burning bush. When Moses doubts the Pharaoh will listen to him, God tells him:
“What is that in your hand?” He said, “A rod.” And He said, “Cast it on the ground.” So he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from it. 4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail” (and he reached out his hand and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand), Exodus 4: 1-3
The very first time we encounter a staff of divine authority, it is immediately linked to a serpent. Here we find a first example of the “shiftiness” of the snake symbol, of its dual nature. In the story of Moses and pharaoh there are two origins of the serpents. We know that Pharaoh’s magicians could produce the same miracle, and so both sides make serpents from staffs, a “good” serpent and a “bad” serpent. The good one eats the bad one.
The shiftiness, the double sided aspect of the serpent symbol appears also in the story of the bronze serpent on several levels. The Israelites had been plagued by serpents, and to save them from the poisonous bites, God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and to put it on a staff. Whoever would look to the bronze serpent would be healed, yet those refusing to do so would die of their snake bite. In terms of duality, we can see clearly here how the serpent is both the disease and cure. Looking to the serpent that was “raised up” will cure one from those serpents that bite “down below”, just as an antidote is made from the poison or a vaccine is made from the disease. Another way to see the duality in the story is how this serpent that was raised up as a healing device, will later be “cast down” by the virtous king Hezekiah for having become an idol (2 Kings 18:4).
With the bronze serpent we understand the serpent is not only related to a staff, but also more generally to the “vertical”, the pole, the ladder, the axis. The staff is only one facet of this vertical symbol. The first and primal version of this symbol is of course the tree. So we must reach further back than Moses in the Biblical text, looking to one of the very first mentions of a specific tree: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the middle of the garden. With this tree we find the serpent, and in Christian iconography, it has been represented unanimously as coiled around the Tree of knowledge as it entices Adam and Eve to eat from its fruit.
We have spoken elsewhere of Death and the garments of skins (here and here), of death as the movement to the periphery, and with the snake wrapped around the tree, it is precisely what we get: death, animalism, skin, basically a series of wheels wrapped around a central axis. The serpent is the image of death, not a kind of extinction, but rather the living death of the Fall, the waxing and waning cycles of birth and death, of pleasure and pain, the life in duality. St-Gregory of Nyssa, the master of symbolism ties some of these images together speaking of men becoming « animals turning the mill. » « With our eyes blindfolded we walk round the mill of life, always treading the same circular path and returning to the same things …we never cease to go round in a circle. »[1].
Just as in the references from the book of Exodus, this primordial image of the serpent in Genesis also shows the general duality of the serpent symbol, for although it is right to say the serpent brought about a great evil, it is better to acknowledge the serpent brought about both good and evil, causing us to experience God as mercy and rigor and all the other manifestations of what we have called right and left hand symbolism in earlier posts (here, here and here).
Having gone from the staff back to the tree, it is difficult not to make the great leap forward which brings us to the foot of Cross. The relationship between the Tree, the staff of Moses or Aaron and the Cross is one I am not inventing. In apocryphal sources, the story of this relationship can be found everywhere from the Golden Legend in the West to the Eastern edge of traditional Christianity, in the Book of the Bee of Syriac Christians. These traditions take different forms, but their essential core is the same, that is how the staff of Moses is made from the tree of Knowledge[2], and the wood from this staff was somehow used to make the cross. The fantastical details in these stories need not keep us, for these traditions should be taken as “pointers” more than anything else, that is as ways to experience more clearly in Biblical tradition what is already there.
When considering these traditions, especially knowing they already participate in the iconography of the crucifixion[3], it cannot but shed a different light on the image. It becomes difficult not to notice the “S” shape of Christ’s body and how it invokes serpent symbolism. Christ compares himself to the bronze serpent saying, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,” (John 3:13-15) and in medieval images it was not rare to see crucifixion images with the snake on the lower tier and Christ on the top tier, both hanging on the same cross/tree of knowledge.
Just as in the references from the book of Exodus, this primordial image of the serpent in Genesis also shows the general duality of the serpent symbol, for although it is right to say the serpent brought about a great evil, it is better to acknowledge the serpent brought about both good and evil, causing us to experience God as mercy and rigor and all the other manifestations of what we have called right and left hand symbolism in earlier posts (here, here and here).
Having gone from the staff back to the tree, it is difficult not to make the great leap forward which brings us to the foot of Cross. The relationship between the Tree, the staff of Moses or Aaron and the Cross is one I am not inventing. In apocryphal sources, the story of this relationship can be found everywhere from the Golden Legend in the West to the Eastern edge of traditional Christianity, in the Book of the Bee of Syriac Christians. These traditions take different forms, but their essential core is the same, that is how the staff of Moses is made from the tree of Knowledge[2], and the wood from this staff was somehow used to make the cross. The fantastical details in these stories need not keep us, for these traditions should be taken as “pointers” more than anything else, that is as ways to experience more clearly in Biblical tradition what is already there.
When considering these traditions, especially knowing they already participate in the iconography of the crucifixion[3], it cannot but shed a different light on the image. It becomes difficult not to notice the “S” shape of Christ’s body and how it invokes serpent symbolism. Christ compares himself to the bronze serpent saying, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,” (John 3:13-15) and in medieval images it was not rare to see crucifixion images with the snake on the lower tier and Christ on the top tier, both hanging on the same cross/tree of knowledge.
This might come as a shock to some, but hopefully a few remarks will calm any controversy. We are used to see the snake as an image of the Evil One, and this is not a false attribution, but symbols are always multiple in depth of meaning. Considering the fullness of the symbol, that is when we look at Moses changing his staff to a serpent or the bronze serpent, limiting the image of a serpent to the Evil One creates some serious problems. Rather, we must look at the serpent more closely within the biblical stories themselves, and see there the power of death, death in the sense we have been expounding: as the periphery, the duality, the cycle, the garments of skin[4]. And this makes more sense within Orthodox teaching of Christ trampling down death by death, of the God-Man uniting himself to death in order to conquer death. In that light it is not surprising to see Christ taking a shape suggesting the serpent on the cross.
For those who still doubt this attribution of the snake to death, we need only consider the other great use of the serpent in iconography, that is the Serpent of Tribulation. In latter images of the Last Judgement, there appears a great serpent which slithers from the upper part of the icon, under Christ, sometimes starting at the foot of Adam, and swerving down to Hell. The human person on his or her death is meant to move along this serpent, and like nodes or knots in the serpent’s body appear the controversial tollhouses. I do not want to engage a discussion on tollhouses here. I only want to show how this use of the serpent is in line with our other interpretations. The movement on the serpent is not just one of moving down to Hell as some have said, but the soul of the deceased is shown both ascending and/or descending. Each station appears, like the bars in Jacob’s ladder, simultaneously as a step going up or coming down. Each sin is balanced by a virtue, each tollhouse contains both possibilities. A powerful quote relating to this from the Ladder of Divine Ascent is when St-John explains that in our spiritual journey “« …the original fervor can only enter by the door it had taken to exit. [5]”
Having grounded the serpent in the Bible, iconography and other Orthodox traditions, we should not be afraid to look at and discuss analogous pagan images, for in this case we have much to ponder. The serpent on a pole is of course one of the oldest symbols we know of, it appears in its single and double versions everywhere from Sumer to Babylon, from the Greeks to the Aztecs. Much of the specific meanings of these lost cultures have disappeared with them, but at least from the Greeks we can gather a few interesting tidbits that will feed into the general meaning. In Greek myth, the serpent on a pole is associated with Asclepius (and to Hermes in its double aspect[6]).
The symbolism of the rod of Asclepius is so close to the bronze serpent that I remember as a child growing up in a Christian home thinking the symbol used by various medical groups was in fact the bronze serpent. Asclepius made his “medicine” from the blood of the Gorgon, one of the snake-related monsters of Antiquity. He would use blood from the right side of the beast to make his cures, suggesting that the left side of the beast was poisonous. Here again we have the dual nature of the snake, of the snake as both the cause and the cure for illness. Continuing along asclepian line in Greek thinking, we should ponder of course the word “pharmakon”, a word extensively used in this context. It is the greek word for “cure” in the medical sense while simultaneously being the word for “poison” or even a “drug” in the sense of “illegal drug” as it is used today. In English, the word “drug” does still contain all these meanings simultaneously. How can a word mean two opposing things at once? In a broader sense, the “pharmakon” is what is added to a nature, a supplement in order to enhance it, but which is also the very cause of its lacking. This addresses once again the nature of the supplement, of the garments of skin as both death and a protection from death. One of the most important words related to “pharmakon” is “pharmakos”, that is the “sacrificial victim”. It was the word used to describe the animal killedin the public sacrifices. In Greek thinking the pharmakos acts as pharmakon, that is, through sacrifice the cycle begins anew. We can see how this relationship finds its ultimate accomplishment in the cross, for if the incarnation of Christ seen at its extreme in the crucifixion is the finality of the garment of skins, if it contains in its unity the duality of the pharmakon, of the left and the right hand, it is because these are brought together in the final pharmakos, the pharmakos that is both God and sacrifice, the perfect and total sacrificial victim. I know the Orthodox approach avoids going too far in this theological direction, yet we should not completely discard it. Christ on the Cross unites heaven and earth by the vertical and gathers all horizontal opposites, heals the duality born in the fruit of the tree of knowledge by uniting the duality of the pharmakon in the God-pharmakos. All is made One in Christ. And in making all things one, duality and multiplicity are not abolished, rather they are seen as finding their root in him, as flowing from his person. This last statement is a fitting point to return to our main subject. Duality, multiplicity, periphery do not need be an image of death. They only become an image of death when they “forget” their anchor, when the tree of Knowledge is viewed as being separate from the Tree of Life. And this is really the meaning of the bishop’s staff, of his crosier. It is the power of heaven on earth, the power of the keys, the power to bind and unbind, to bring in the sheep and push away the wolves, to bless and to curse. It is duality as expression of unity, periphery as expression of center. And so whether there are two serpents or one, whether a “Tau” or a crosier, the meaning is the same.
Russian Bishop's Crozier- 16th century
|
Armenian pastoral staff (1600-1850) Pastoral staff of ebony with tau-head and mounts of silver parcel-gilt. Eight sided, decorated with strips of silver chased with a vine pattern, parcel gilt, and divided into sections by four oval knops, spirally fluted and chased with leaves. The tau head is formed of two scrolls with dragon/snake heads chased with foliated ornament. At the bottom of the shaft is a baluster shaped foot.
|
[1] Gregory of Nyssa quoted by Nellas in Deification in Christ, 87
[2] In some Traditions it is the tree of life and not the tree of Knowledge. In the Golden Legend for example both traditions are mentioned side by side. In the Book of Bee, I think we can see a hint to understanding this conundrum. In this version, the tree of knowledge/staff of Moses is used to make the “transversal” of the cross, the “horizontal” where Christ’s left and right hands are crucified. The tree of Life in this case, could be seen as the “vertical” aspect of the cross, the “bridge” between heaven and earth, and the Tree of Knowledge showing the cross as a “balance” in the manner we have shown earlier.
[3]The idea of Adam’s skull buried at Calvary is part of these cycles of traditions.
[4] In the Genesis story, the relation to death is obvious, so too in the story of the Bronze serpent. And although it appears less clearly at first glance, in the story of the staff of Moses we see the same. For the final result of the process begun with the staff becoming a snake is the coming of the Angel of Death on the land of Egypt. This both casts down the Egyptians and frees the Israelites, just as it is the death of Christ that lifted the “good thief” and brought down the “bad thief”.
[5], 1st degree, paragraph 25
[6] In the case of Hermes, there are a few things worth saying. Hermes is the messenger and the trickster. In this sense he is a “bridge” between worlds, he moves back and forth and in doing so he also has with him the power of inversion which is the root of trickery. This is in my opinion the main reason for the caduceus. Seeing the caduceus in this light can help us to understand a bit more how the death of Christ on the cross, his hanging on the tree is almost a mirror image of what happened in the Garden. It is indeed presented as a trick in many liturgical texts. Christ tricks the devil and hades by changing death into life, a reversion of what had been inverted at the beginning with the serpent.
Source: http://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/the-serpents-of-orthodoxy/
[2] In some Traditions it is the tree of life and not the tree of Knowledge. In the Golden Legend for example both traditions are mentioned side by side. In the Book of Bee, I think we can see a hint to understanding this conundrum. In this version, the tree of knowledge/staff of Moses is used to make the “transversal” of the cross, the “horizontal” where Christ’s left and right hands are crucified. The tree of Life in this case, could be seen as the “vertical” aspect of the cross, the “bridge” between heaven and earth, and the Tree of Knowledge showing the cross as a “balance” in the manner we have shown earlier.
[3]The idea of Adam’s skull buried at Calvary is part of these cycles of traditions.
[4] In the Genesis story, the relation to death is obvious, so too in the story of the Bronze serpent. And although it appears less clearly at first glance, in the story of the staff of Moses we see the same. For the final result of the process begun with the staff becoming a snake is the coming of the Angel of Death on the land of Egypt. This both casts down the Egyptians and frees the Israelites, just as it is the death of Christ that lifted the “good thief” and brought down the “bad thief”.
[5], 1st degree, paragraph 25
[6] In the case of Hermes, there are a few things worth saying. Hermes is the messenger and the trickster. In this sense he is a “bridge” between worlds, he moves back and forth and in doing so he also has with him the power of inversion which is the root of trickery. This is in my opinion the main reason for the caduceus. Seeing the caduceus in this light can help us to understand a bit more how the death of Christ on the cross, his hanging on the tree is almost a mirror image of what happened in the Garden. It is indeed presented as a trick in many liturgical texts. Christ tricks the devil and hades by changing death into life, a reversion of what had been inverted at the beginning with the serpent.
Source: http://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/the-serpents-of-orthodoxy/
Gnosticism- The Empire Strickes Back
The Dog-Headed Icon of St-Christopher (Pt.2): Encountering Saint-Christopher
By Jonathan Pageau
In my last article on the dog-headed icon of St-Christopher, I promised to take the reader on an encounter with the Saint. In order to do this, we must travel quite far from our main subject of iconography, but this is necessary to understand such a peculiar Saint. Hopefully, the reader who approaches the edge and even enters the water with me will emerge with a clearer vision of St-Christopher and why he is worth our attention.
The shape of the world.
As I already mentioned, the key to the strangeness of St-Christopher lies in truly grasping the strict analogy between individual Man and the entire Cosmos. Saint-Maximos reminds us that Man is Microcosm, that he contains within him all of creation by being the center of creation, the place where all of creation converges. Man as center, as mediator between heaven and earth, has two horizons, one leading inward and upward to the Angelic realms and finally to the Uncreated, and one leading outward and downwards towards the rest of creation and ultimately reaching primordial Chaos. Man even participates in the very existence of the Cosmos by the act of “naming”. This is seen in Genesis when Adam names the animals, acting, let’s face it, as a kind of “demiurge” in regards to creation. Man mirrors on a more limited scale by his own logos what the Logos did in being the Father’s means of Creation. The Divine Logos is the source of actual being: “let there be…”. Man’s logos is the source of specificity: “this is a…”.
Through the Fall, man was “decentred” from his own heart, the result of which is also to be chased from the cosmic center, the Holy of Holies, the garden where the tree of life is. In this state, the two horizons I mentioned, one leading towards God, and one leading towards Chaos are changed into limits, boundaries. Before the fall it is said Man was clothed in glory, and similarly he had access to the glories of God. The fall “hardened” those glories, transformed them into limits. There are two limits appearing to man, one limit on each “horizon”. The inward limit is the cherub with a flaming sword preventing the entry into paradise, and the outward limit is that layer of skin, that limit of corporality or animality blocking our complete dissolution into the chaos of death. Although wherever one stands, one can only perceive one limit on each horizon, there are many of these boundaries, many veils of the heart, many garments of skin. We should understand them as akin to layers of an onion, as rungs on the ladder of Divine Ascent, levels in the Hierarchy described by the Aeropagite. The clearest image is in the Old Testament Tabernacle, having a cherub on its inner most veil of linen, then a series of thicker “wilder” coverings, a wool veil, a ram’s skin dyed red, and then what is possibly the skin of a porpoise or at least a fully wild animal (see Exodus 36) .
By Jonathan Pageau
In my last article on the dog-headed icon of St-Christopher, I promised to take the reader on an encounter with the Saint. In order to do this, we must travel quite far from our main subject of iconography, but this is necessary to understand such a peculiar Saint. Hopefully, the reader who approaches the edge and even enters the water with me will emerge with a clearer vision of St-Christopher and why he is worth our attention.
The shape of the world.
As I already mentioned, the key to the strangeness of St-Christopher lies in truly grasping the strict analogy between individual Man and the entire Cosmos. Saint-Maximos reminds us that Man is Microcosm, that he contains within him all of creation by being the center of creation, the place where all of creation converges. Man as center, as mediator between heaven and earth, has two horizons, one leading inward and upward to the Angelic realms and finally to the Uncreated, and one leading outward and downwards towards the rest of creation and ultimately reaching primordial Chaos. Man even participates in the very existence of the Cosmos by the act of “naming”. This is seen in Genesis when Adam names the animals, acting, let’s face it, as a kind of “demiurge” in regards to creation. Man mirrors on a more limited scale by his own logos what the Logos did in being the Father’s means of Creation. The Divine Logos is the source of actual being: “let there be…”. Man’s logos is the source of specificity: “this is a…”.
Through the Fall, man was “decentred” from his own heart, the result of which is also to be chased from the cosmic center, the Holy of Holies, the garden where the tree of life is. In this state, the two horizons I mentioned, one leading towards God, and one leading towards Chaos are changed into limits, boundaries. Before the fall it is said Man was clothed in glory, and similarly he had access to the glories of God. The fall “hardened” those glories, transformed them into limits. There are two limits appearing to man, one limit on each “horizon”. The inward limit is the cherub with a flaming sword preventing the entry into paradise, and the outward limit is that layer of skin, that limit of corporality or animality blocking our complete dissolution into the chaos of death. Although wherever one stands, one can only perceive one limit on each horizon, there are many of these boundaries, many veils of the heart, many garments of skin. We should understand them as akin to layers of an onion, as rungs on the ladder of Divine Ascent, levels in the Hierarchy described by the Aeropagite. The clearest image is in the Old Testament Tabernacle, having a cherub on its inner most veil of linen, then a series of thicker “wilder” coverings, a wool veil, a ram’s skin dyed red, and then what is possibly the skin of a porpoise or at least a fully wild animal (see Exodus 36) .
The structure I have just described is the ontological shape of things: the shape of man, of a church, a temple, a city, a civilization, and even the cosmos itself. It is bathing in this type symbolism that ancient civilizations developed their cosmology, the idea that “their” center, their “omphalos”, was surrounded by progressively more chaotic, foreign, even monstrous peoples and creatures until one reached a limit, those Caspian Gates in the North, beyond which was an almost “un-named” darkness and chaos. There was also that other limit- a more inner set of “veils”, leading finally to a far away land of the blessed, a paradise, an Eden. In a Church these two limits are the iconostasis which veils the altar, and the western limit of the church where the main door is. By now one will not be surprised to know that in some Greek traditions, the icon of St-Christopher is placed above the western exit door so that it is in a way the last icon seen before going out into the chaotic world. This is of course a similar symbolism as that of gargoyles placed on the outer walls of Western churches.
Notre Dame Cathedral -Paris, France, Gargouylle
The Shape of the Limit
The limit, edge or buffer between two things, as a manifestation of the garments of skin, comes to us as death and darkening. This marginal space can also appear as a hybrid, mixture, an in-between which mingles elements together. Hybridity, like a bridge touching both sides of a river, is the natural shape of an in between place. It is also something that inevitably happens with the unknown as it presents itself to us. When we encounter something unusual to us, it is for us a relative chaos, we could say that it has not yet been properly “named” in the sense of Adam naming the animals, it is not in unity with our logos. Whatever this foreign thing presenting itself to us, it will attempt to appear within the categories we know, yet this will cause monstrosity, mixture between two categories or else too much or too little of something. This unknown can in extreme cases, lacking for us its own possibility to exist, present itself as an inversion of a category we know. All the monsters and fantastical races of Ancient times have one of these forms, giants, mermaids, unicorns, Amazons, even the dragon in traditional iconography appears as a hybrid: a snake or a lizard, with wings and often some hairy parts.
The limit, edge or buffer between two things, as a manifestation of the garments of skin, comes to us as death and darkening. This marginal space can also appear as a hybrid, mixture, an in-between which mingles elements together. Hybridity, like a bridge touching both sides of a river, is the natural shape of an in between place. It is also something that inevitably happens with the unknown as it presents itself to us. When we encounter something unusual to us, it is for us a relative chaos, we could say that it has not yet been properly “named” in the sense of Adam naming the animals, it is not in unity with our logos. Whatever this foreign thing presenting itself to us, it will attempt to appear within the categories we know, yet this will cause monstrosity, mixture between two categories or else too much or too little of something. This unknown can in extreme cases, lacking for us its own possibility to exist, present itself as an inversion of a category we know. All the monsters and fantastical races of Ancient times have one of these forms, giants, mermaids, unicorns, Amazons, even the dragon in traditional iconography appears as a hybrid: a snake or a lizard, with wings and often some hairy parts.
The contact with the foreign as a social manifestation of chaos and death is akin to our own individual passions which are also caused by our mortality, and these two levels will inevitably overlap with each other, one being the outward or inward sign of the other. Chaos is a lack of order, a lack of logos, a question that begs to be answered. Just as a passion, it appears as hunger, as a lack that tortures us until it is satisfied. And so there is a certain danger when we encounter the relative chaos which lurks at the limit of what we are, both in individual or social terms. The danger is an overwhelming desire to “fill the void”, to impetuously know that which we face. This desire to know is the same as Eve’s desire for the fruit of knowledge, a desire to eat, to take in. It is an urge to immediately “participate” in that chaos, to consume it and often to lose ourselves in it, not through the reasonable mediation of logos but through a mingling at the edge. If one lets oneself be tempted by chaos, one will project into what is unknown those things which lie at our own edge, our secret passions, either our want and desire, or our fear and hatred. There is no difference between these two extremes in spiritual terms. In the end, both the Cannibal Barbarian Savage and the Noble Savage united with Nature are two sides of the same coin, two ways of projecting our passions into the foreign1.
The structure of the relation of centre to periphery, of logos to chaos explains some of the stranger aspects in the Orthodox tradition. When I read of people’s problem with St-Christopher and the way he presents himself to us, I often wonder whether these people have at all read the lives of the saints. In monastic writings, especially in the desert Fathers we will see this structure being played out again and again. In the life of St-Anthony itself, we find the beginning of the pattern. St-Anthony encounters Satan as an Ethiopian boy, and this will continue to be a characteristic of monastic writing all through the middle ages, where demons, being tightly linked to the saint’s passions, will appear as Ethiopians. The Ethiopian, just as in the conversion story in Acts, becomes the image of the limit, though here we see the negative aspects of death, the dangerous side of the garments of skin acting as vehicle for the demonic. Such stories of Ethiopians have led many people to interpret these monastic stories as a kind of proto-racism, though this is a very anachronistic and simplistic interpretation. For those who have followed my constant discussions on the garments of skin and the double movement of periphery, a far more subtle and profound image will appear.
Indeed there are other stories of Ethiopians in tradition. For example, in the story of St-Arsenius, having decided to leave the desert, we read that : “Near the river a certain Ethiopian slave-girl approached and touched his sheepskin, and the old man rebuked her. Therefore the slave-girl said to him, ‘If you are a monk, go to the desert.’ The old man, struck by compunction at this word, said to himself, ‘Arsenius, if you are a monk, go to the desert.2” The reader will no longer be surprised to find the “water crossing” structure expounded in my last article. All the symbols are there: It happens at a river, the monk’s “garment of skin” is touched by the Ethiopian girl, and although at first the saint is terrified and rebukes her, he finds in her the means to return to the desert, to cross back over the river as Elisha did. So in this story, the Ethiopian appears as the positive side of periphery, as the Ark by which the saint is saved from his temptations. In the life of st-Moses the Black, we also find this same structure. His story has him being foiled by a dog in committing a robbery and later swimming across a river to slaughter the sheep of the dog’s owner. He then hides with monks where he becomes a Christian and later a saint. Notice the dog, the river, the dead animals and the crossing over which leads to salvation. Over and over the same story occurs as the edge can be an image of death as limit or death as crossing over.
Saint Anthony does not only encounter the demonic as an Ethiopian boy, he also finds the limit as hybrid. In the desert he faces a Satyr and a Centaur, two animal-human hybrids linked even in Greco-Roman thinking with lust, passion and the edge 3.
The structure of the relation of centre to periphery, of logos to chaos explains some of the stranger aspects in the Orthodox tradition. When I read of people’s problem with St-Christopher and the way he presents himself to us, I often wonder whether these people have at all read the lives of the saints. In monastic writings, especially in the desert Fathers we will see this structure being played out again and again. In the life of St-Anthony itself, we find the beginning of the pattern. St-Anthony encounters Satan as an Ethiopian boy, and this will continue to be a characteristic of monastic writing all through the middle ages, where demons, being tightly linked to the saint’s passions, will appear as Ethiopians. The Ethiopian, just as in the conversion story in Acts, becomes the image of the limit, though here we see the negative aspects of death, the dangerous side of the garments of skin acting as vehicle for the demonic. Such stories of Ethiopians have led many people to interpret these monastic stories as a kind of proto-racism, though this is a very anachronistic and simplistic interpretation. For those who have followed my constant discussions on the garments of skin and the double movement of periphery, a far more subtle and profound image will appear.
Indeed there are other stories of Ethiopians in tradition. For example, in the story of St-Arsenius, having decided to leave the desert, we read that : “Near the river a certain Ethiopian slave-girl approached and touched his sheepskin, and the old man rebuked her. Therefore the slave-girl said to him, ‘If you are a monk, go to the desert.’ The old man, struck by compunction at this word, said to himself, ‘Arsenius, if you are a monk, go to the desert.2” The reader will no longer be surprised to find the “water crossing” structure expounded in my last article. All the symbols are there: It happens at a river, the monk’s “garment of skin” is touched by the Ethiopian girl, and although at first the saint is terrified and rebukes her, he finds in her the means to return to the desert, to cross back over the river as Elisha did. So in this story, the Ethiopian appears as the positive side of periphery, as the Ark by which the saint is saved from his temptations. In the life of st-Moses the Black, we also find this same structure. His story has him being foiled by a dog in committing a robbery and later swimming across a river to slaughter the sheep of the dog’s owner. He then hides with monks where he becomes a Christian and later a saint. Notice the dog, the river, the dead animals and the crossing over which leads to salvation. Over and over the same story occurs as the edge can be an image of death as limit or death as crossing over.
Saint Anthony does not only encounter the demonic as an Ethiopian boy, he also finds the limit as hybrid. In the desert he faces a Satyr and a Centaur, two animal-human hybrids linked even in Greco-Roman thinking with lust, passion and the edge 3.
At this point I will give a clear example from recent history to avoid the danger that what I am saying might seem like esoteric speculation. At the end of the nineteenth century, through the imperialist expansion of Western powers, much “tribal” art began to appear on the European horizon. Greeted as “curiosities”, these images, which had been yanked from their traditional context appeared as objects of speculation and fantasy. Many people would experience surprise and some disgust facing these images, as the features, like pointy teeth, scarifications, geometric abstraction were extremely foreign to Western sensibilities.
Many artists, though, saw in these masks and statuettes an image of wild creativity, of visual freedom and sexual passions let loose. The Dadaist artists would prance around half naked wearing masks and beating drums, making incongruous sounds in a kind of emotive and sexual frenzy which they thought imitated tribal culture. Artists who were bent on destroying the artistic order of things began including these masks into their paintings, the German Expressionists especially, but also people like Picasso, who put African masks on his prostitutes in the infamous “Demoiselles d’Avignon”. The foreign, in this case, was used as a vehicle for projecting all that was on the edge of their civilization, a tool to destroy the rules of visual coherence. These images by early modern artists were used in a way that can only be called “demonic”. But having lived in Africa for 7 years I can say that contrary to being “wildly creative”, these objects are extremely typological and their forms are copied and handed down from generation to generation. Also, in an African view, these objects are mostly used as “identity forming”, as ways to preserve current social structures and practices, including social sexual norms and taboos, not as ways to destroy them, which is what Europeans used them for. It was the “foreign” nature of these images, the fact that they appeared detached from anything they knew which brought people to project into them whatever they had in their own “dark corners" 4
Many artists, though, saw in these masks and statuettes an image of wild creativity, of visual freedom and sexual passions let loose. The Dadaist artists would prance around half naked wearing masks and beating drums, making incongruous sounds in a kind of emotive and sexual frenzy which they thought imitated tribal culture. Artists who were bent on destroying the artistic order of things began including these masks into their paintings, the German Expressionists especially, but also people like Picasso, who put African masks on his prostitutes in the infamous “Demoiselles d’Avignon”. The foreign, in this case, was used as a vehicle for projecting all that was on the edge of their civilization, a tool to destroy the rules of visual coherence. These images by early modern artists were used in a way that can only be called “demonic”. But having lived in Africa for 7 years I can say that contrary to being “wildly creative”, these objects are extremely typological and their forms are copied and handed down from generation to generation. Also, in an African view, these objects are mostly used as “identity forming”, as ways to preserve current social structures and practices, including social sexual norms and taboos, not as ways to destroy them, which is what Europeans used them for. It was the “foreign” nature of these images, the fact that they appeared detached from anything they knew which brought people to project into them whatever they had in their own “dark corners" 4
In order to balance out my last point, it is important to specify that hybridity and darkness do not just appear at the outer edge, but they also appear at the inner limit, as the veil covering the glory of God. The Cherubim forming the mercy seat on the Ark, the Cherubim stitched into the veil of the holy of holies, the Cherub spinning the flaming sword at the gate of Paradise, that cherub which appears to Ezekiel as he approaches the glory of God are all described as a hybrid with four animal faces: the man, the ox, the lion and the eagle.
|
They are described as having four wings to cover themselves and the legs of an ox. The cherub has been linked by many to the Babylonian Kerub which plays a similar function as the sphinx, both of which guarded holy places.
In iconography, the Cherubic structure appears in the tetramorph and is attached to the limit, the “corners” of Christ’s glory while being associated with the “hardening”, the exteriorisation of the Logos into the four Gospels. But even the more “personal” angels, like st-Michael or st-Gabriel who though they have human faces, also appear as hybrid with their bird-wings. And just as the cherub with a sword, or as st-Christopher the warrior saint, the original iconography of Archangels is to show them as soldiers. Our perception of angels has been much softened since the Renaissance, giving in to the pastel floating blonds of New Age sensibilities. But even the most holy Theotokos was at first terrified at her contact with the Archangel.
In iconography, the Cherubic structure appears in the tetramorph and is attached to the limit, the “corners” of Christ’s glory while being associated with the “hardening”, the exteriorisation of the Logos into the four Gospels. But even the more “personal” angels, like st-Michael or st-Gabriel who though they have human faces, also appear as hybrid with their bird-wings. And just as the cherub with a sword, or as st-Christopher the warrior saint, the original iconography of Archangels is to show them as soldiers. Our perception of angels has been much softened since the Renaissance, giving in to the pastel floating blonds of New Age sensibilities. But even the most holy Theotokos was at first terrified at her contact with the Archangel.
Experiencing the limit in our own culture
The experience of what is foreign as a relative chaos is one all of us have had to differing degrees. If one hears a language close to our own, if an English speaker hears German or Latin for example, one will be able to make out some of the meaning. If an English speaker hears Russian, that person will not understand anything but will be possibly be able to perceive structure, words, tone. But if one hears Vietnamese, one might find it difficult to even make out any structure, any tone and there are some sounds an English speaker will not even be able to perceive as they are “too far” from one’s horizon of hearing. It is noise to us. Such an experience is the most cited origin of the word “barbarian”, that is how the language of foreigners appeared to the Greco-Roman world as animal noises, a kind of barking: Bar-Bar-Bar-Bar. The dog-headed man is a visual version of this perception. The problem for us today is that because of mass media and image culture, we have “seen it all” and so the extreme visual experience of the foreign is difficult to have, but maybe all of us have had at least a somewhat milder version of this. Most people have experienced talking with someone and thinking that person a stranger, and then for some reason one discovers that the person is someone we know. Suddenly our perception of their face changes before our very eyes, what was a random face becomes the face of our acquaintance, so much that we would find it difficult to remember how we saw the very same face before our little revelation5. Although there is no scientific category or formula that could capture the difference between that face I did not know and the face I know, it would be very dishonest to say that either of my experiences was “wrong”. The scientific “data”, the cold clinical description of a face, if that description actually even exists, cannot help to differentiate between what is foreign and what is familiar. The foreign and familiar are unquantifiable and entirely within the realm of human experience. And It is precisely human experience, not a kind of clinical and alienated dissection of the world, which is the basis of all Christian symbolism. To deny this is to put much into jeopardy. To deny this is to make incoherent the very “heaven” where Christ ascended, for certainly he did not go float up there where the space station hangs.
I believe in the case of the icon of St-Christopher we have a visual representation of this experience of the foreign. It is the encounter with a face that is so far from our capacity to perceive familiarity that it presents itself as monstrous and hybrid. If one looks at the stories of Dog-Headed men or other monstrous races, travellers encounter them in every limit, even as this limit moves further east, west and north. If Alexander in his Romance encounters the cynocephali in Asia minor, King Arthur encounters them in Scotland, Charlemagne as Vikings from Scandinavia, and Marco Polo and other travellers would also encounter them further out, and finally even Columbus himself will think he finds them in the Americas. The limit always appears as monstrous. This is just how human beings interact with the world, and whether you fear and hate that monster, or whether you desire and idealize it, it is monstrous none the less. St-Christopher is to us the “farthest” person, the person which we can barely see because of our own limited horizon. He is also for us our own limit, our garments skin, to which we should not deny the danger and monstrosity, but which has the potential of being christophoros, just as that farthest of persons has the same potential, for it was Christ’s last words to us that he would be with us until the ends of the earth. And in the end, as Gentiles, it is we who are this original “foreigner’, for as so St-Paul insists: “ And you who were once strangers and enemies in mind, doing evil deeds, he has reconciled in his fleshy body so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him. »6
Well, I was hoping to get to the end of all this within two posts, but despite all that has been said, it still seems I have not fully answered the big objection to St-Christopher: how in our scientific age, as fully rational and objective people, we no longer have these monstrous races in the dark corners of our maps. Well, it seems we might have to look at those maps again, because from the corner of my eye, I think I saw some strange things moving about there! I have also left open a strange question of how both the cherub and the monster at the edge of the world seem to share common traits. This can be a dangerous question to leave open, so we need one final part of this series, where we will talk of cannibalism, foreign women and little green men. Hopefully it will be the strangest post I will ever have to write fo the OAJ. After that, we can get back to liturgical art.
———————————————————————————–
1 This structure of extremes in perception of the foreigner is often said to originate in the 17th century with the strong resurgence of slavery opposed by the other extreme of Rousseau’s Noble Savage, but even in Roman times Tacitus’ Germania uses Germanic people as a foil to Roman identity.
2 Quoted in David Brakke, Demons and the Making of The Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity, Harvard University Press, 2006. P.171
3 A clear example appears in the story of the centaur Nessus from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Heracles asked the centaur Nessus to cross his wife to the other side of a river. But in this version of the limit and water crossing, the hybrid centaur tricks Heracles and makes off with his wife. There is often a trick in the water crossing story. This is related to the very double nature of the garments of skin, the ultimate “trick” being Christ’s trampling down death by death. In the story of St-Christopher, this trick is played by Christ on St-Christopher in not revealing who he is until the end of the crossing. In the Exodus crossing of the Jordan, we must not forget that it was two spies who crossed. In the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops, Odysseus tricks the Cyclops in believing his name is “nobody”, and only reveals his real name when he has escaped by holding unto the underside (skins) of sheep.
4 My point is not to give either a detailed critique or defence of African religions, but it is rather to show how the monastic experience of the edge as foreigner is one which is still valid today. I used African art because I know it well and because of the Ethiopian reference in monastic writings, but one can see the same pattern in contemporary obsessions with Buddhism, where a lack of knowledge will permit people to project into Buddhism all their fantasies and ideals. This is even something those of us who converted to Orthodoxy should be aware of, that is how the original “exotic” appeal of Orthodoxy can in the end become a barrier to true communion for those coming from outside.
5 My wife and I lived in Africa for 7 years. Though I grew up in North America, where people of African descent are a normal part of life, my wife grew up in Slovakia where she had almost never seen an African person until she moved to North America. Because the encounter with Africans had for so long been beyond my wife’s horizon, while in Africa she always had difficulty recognizing people and differentiating people’s faces. This was not something she was deliberately doing as it caused her much difficulty in her daily life.
6 1 Col 1:22
SOURCE: http://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/the-dog-headed-icon-of-st-christopher-pt-2-encountering-saint-christopher/
The experience of what is foreign as a relative chaos is one all of us have had to differing degrees. If one hears a language close to our own, if an English speaker hears German or Latin for example, one will be able to make out some of the meaning. If an English speaker hears Russian, that person will not understand anything but will be possibly be able to perceive structure, words, tone. But if one hears Vietnamese, one might find it difficult to even make out any structure, any tone and there are some sounds an English speaker will not even be able to perceive as they are “too far” from one’s horizon of hearing. It is noise to us. Such an experience is the most cited origin of the word “barbarian”, that is how the language of foreigners appeared to the Greco-Roman world as animal noises, a kind of barking: Bar-Bar-Bar-Bar. The dog-headed man is a visual version of this perception. The problem for us today is that because of mass media and image culture, we have “seen it all” and so the extreme visual experience of the foreign is difficult to have, but maybe all of us have had at least a somewhat milder version of this. Most people have experienced talking with someone and thinking that person a stranger, and then for some reason one discovers that the person is someone we know. Suddenly our perception of their face changes before our very eyes, what was a random face becomes the face of our acquaintance, so much that we would find it difficult to remember how we saw the very same face before our little revelation5. Although there is no scientific category or formula that could capture the difference between that face I did not know and the face I know, it would be very dishonest to say that either of my experiences was “wrong”. The scientific “data”, the cold clinical description of a face, if that description actually even exists, cannot help to differentiate between what is foreign and what is familiar. The foreign and familiar are unquantifiable and entirely within the realm of human experience. And It is precisely human experience, not a kind of clinical and alienated dissection of the world, which is the basis of all Christian symbolism. To deny this is to put much into jeopardy. To deny this is to make incoherent the very “heaven” where Christ ascended, for certainly he did not go float up there where the space station hangs.
I believe in the case of the icon of St-Christopher we have a visual representation of this experience of the foreign. It is the encounter with a face that is so far from our capacity to perceive familiarity that it presents itself as monstrous and hybrid. If one looks at the stories of Dog-Headed men or other monstrous races, travellers encounter them in every limit, even as this limit moves further east, west and north. If Alexander in his Romance encounters the cynocephali in Asia minor, King Arthur encounters them in Scotland, Charlemagne as Vikings from Scandinavia, and Marco Polo and other travellers would also encounter them further out, and finally even Columbus himself will think he finds them in the Americas. The limit always appears as monstrous. This is just how human beings interact with the world, and whether you fear and hate that monster, or whether you desire and idealize it, it is monstrous none the less. St-Christopher is to us the “farthest” person, the person which we can barely see because of our own limited horizon. He is also for us our own limit, our garments skin, to which we should not deny the danger and monstrosity, but which has the potential of being christophoros, just as that farthest of persons has the same potential, for it was Christ’s last words to us that he would be with us until the ends of the earth. And in the end, as Gentiles, it is we who are this original “foreigner’, for as so St-Paul insists: “ And you who were once strangers and enemies in mind, doing evil deeds, he has reconciled in his fleshy body so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him. »6
Well, I was hoping to get to the end of all this within two posts, but despite all that has been said, it still seems I have not fully answered the big objection to St-Christopher: how in our scientific age, as fully rational and objective people, we no longer have these monstrous races in the dark corners of our maps. Well, it seems we might have to look at those maps again, because from the corner of my eye, I think I saw some strange things moving about there! I have also left open a strange question of how both the cherub and the monster at the edge of the world seem to share common traits. This can be a dangerous question to leave open, so we need one final part of this series, where we will talk of cannibalism, foreign women and little green men. Hopefully it will be the strangest post I will ever have to write fo the OAJ. After that, we can get back to liturgical art.
———————————————————————————–
1 This structure of extremes in perception of the foreigner is often said to originate in the 17th century with the strong resurgence of slavery opposed by the other extreme of Rousseau’s Noble Savage, but even in Roman times Tacitus’ Germania uses Germanic people as a foil to Roman identity.
2 Quoted in David Brakke, Demons and the Making of The Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity, Harvard University Press, 2006. P.171
3 A clear example appears in the story of the centaur Nessus from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Heracles asked the centaur Nessus to cross his wife to the other side of a river. But in this version of the limit and water crossing, the hybrid centaur tricks Heracles and makes off with his wife. There is often a trick in the water crossing story. This is related to the very double nature of the garments of skin, the ultimate “trick” being Christ’s trampling down death by death. In the story of St-Christopher, this trick is played by Christ on St-Christopher in not revealing who he is until the end of the crossing. In the Exodus crossing of the Jordan, we must not forget that it was two spies who crossed. In the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops, Odysseus tricks the Cyclops in believing his name is “nobody”, and only reveals his real name when he has escaped by holding unto the underside (skins) of sheep.
4 My point is not to give either a detailed critique or defence of African religions, but it is rather to show how the monastic experience of the edge as foreigner is one which is still valid today. I used African art because I know it well and because of the Ethiopian reference in monastic writings, but one can see the same pattern in contemporary obsessions with Buddhism, where a lack of knowledge will permit people to project into Buddhism all their fantasies and ideals. This is even something those of us who converted to Orthodoxy should be aware of, that is how the original “exotic” appeal of Orthodoxy can in the end become a barrier to true communion for those coming from outside.
5 My wife and I lived in Africa for 7 years. Though I grew up in North America, where people of African descent are a normal part of life, my wife grew up in Slovakia where she had almost never seen an African person until she moved to North America. Because the encounter with Africans had for so long been beyond my wife’s horizon, while in Africa she always had difficulty recognizing people and differentiating people’s faces. This was not something she was deliberately doing as it caused her much difficulty in her daily life.
6 1 Col 1:22
SOURCE: http://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/the-dog-headed-icon-of-st-christopher-pt-2-encountering-saint-christopher/
Understanding The Dog-Headed Icon of St-Christopher ( Pt1)
By Jonathan Pageau
This article is a part of a series
The icon of St-Christopher is one of the most astounding images found in the Orthodox Tradition. Showing a dog-headed warrior saint, it conjures fantastical stories of werewolves or of monstrous races from Pliny’s edge of the world. Because of all the difficulties it presents, the icon was proscribed in the 18th century by Moscow.In the Roman Catholic Church, the feast of St-Christopher was suppressed entirely with Vatican II modernization, though he continues to be one of the most popular saints in Catholicism — his image adorning the dashboard of cars all over the world. I believe understanding St-Christopher and his iconography is of prime importance today, and hopefully it will become clear why as we travel through the Bible, Tradition and iconography to see if we can decipher this saint who is such an affront to modern sensibilities. Scholarly studies on the origin of St-Christopher are available[2]. But in these, one must endure the usual ho-hum conclusions that Christian tradition develops basically as a series of misunderstandings, confusions and fantastical exaggerations. Modern scholars seem to believe that coherent meaning and analogy cannot exist without a kind of mechanical cause-effect historical development. When they see the overlays occurring in tradition between the term “Caïnite” – sons of Cain, “Canaanite”(cananeus) – giants of Canaan, and “Caninite” (canineus)—Dog-men, these scholars immediately enlighten us on the mistaken transcriptions of those cave-dwelling Cro-Magnons of the middle ages. Yet these same scholars remain blind to how profound and intuitive some of these relations can be.
Iconography of Monsters
The use of dog-headed men in iconography is not limited to the icon of St-Christopher. They also appear most commonly in images of Pentecost, prominently in Armenian manuscripts, but also in Western images. The Dog-headed men are seen as the farthest race present at Pentecost. Because they are the farthest, in some Armenian images they appear in the center of the door or else they appear alone, representing a distilled image of the ultimate foreigner. There are some other images, for example a well-known image where dog-headed men are represented as the Barbarian enemies who threaten Christ. Sometimes they are seen as one of the races encountered in the mission of the Apostles. Finally, dog-headed men appear in the story of St-Mercurios[3], a warrior saint who’s father was eaten by two dog-headed men later converted by St-Mercurios. These dog-headed men’s savage nature could be unleashed by St-Mercurios on the enemies of the Roman empire in a way analogous to how Romans and later Christians used Barbarians in their own wars. The most obvious examples of this is how the recently converted Germanic Barbarians stopped the advance of Islam into Europe or how the recently converted Scandinavian prince of Kiev provided the Emperor in Constantinople with a personal Varingian guard.
These iconographic examples show the dog-headed men as representing barbarian foreigners par excellence, those living on the edge of the world, the edge of humanity itself. They are cannibal, savage, hybrid creatures who later will be conceived as descendants of Cain fallen to a monstrous state. The giant Canaanite of Catholic images, who has now often integrated Orthodox iconography, though less visually shocking for having lost his monstrous face, signifies the same reality as Dog-Headed men. The giants in the Bible and in Christian tradition are often also interpreted as descendants of Cain and monstrous cannibal barbarians, who by their excessive bodies represent the extreme of corporality itself.
The relation of the foreign and marginal with excessive corporality, animality and disordered passions like cannibalism must be seen within a general traditional understanding of periphery. In a traditional view of the world, there is an analogy between personal and social periphery, both pictured in patristic terms as the garments of skin, those garments given to Adam and Eve which embody corporal existence. What appears at the edge of Man is analogous to what appears at the edge of the world both in spatial and temporal terms, so the barbarians, dog-headed men or other monsters on the spatial boundaries of civilization and the temporal end of civilization are akin to the death and animality which is the corporal spatial limit of an individual and the final temporal end of earthly life. The monsters as part of the garments of skin dwell on the edge of the world, and though they are dangerous, like Cerberus at the door of Hades, they also act as a kind of buffer between Man and the outer darkness. Just as our corporal bodies and its cycles are the source of our passions, they are also our “mortal shell” protecting us from death. It will therefore be by a more profound vision of the garments of skin across different ontological levels of fallen creation that we can make sense of St-Christopher[4].
St-Christopher in the Bible.
The relation of the Dog to periphery appears several places in the Bible. Dogs are of course an impure animal. They are seen licking the sores on Job’s skin[5]. They are excluded from the New Jerusalem[6]. They eat the body of the foreign queen Jezebel after she is thrown off the wall of the city[7]. The giant Goliath himself creates the St-Christopher dog/giant/foreigner analogy when he asks David: Am I a dog that you come at me with sticks?[8] The dog is used by Christ as a substitution for a foreigner when he tells the Samaritan that one should not give to dogs what is meant for the children[9]. The answer of the woman is also telling as she speaks of crumbs falling off the edge of the table, clearly marking the dog as the foreigner who is on the edge. Just these examples might be enough to explain St-Christopher symbolically, but there is still more.
The key to finding St-Christopher more profoundly in the Bible is the story of his crossing the river. In Scripture, there are several significant stories of water crossings, and through these appear the essential elements of the St-Christopher story as it relates to periphery and the garments of skin. As we search we must remember the movement of the garments of skins being both death and cure for death, both the cause of and the solution to the world of the fall. This means that the symbols will all be there in the different stories, but they can sometimes slip from one side to the other. The first example comes in the flood story, where Noah builds an ark, a shell full of animals to escape the world of fallen giants[10]. Then in the crossing of the Red Sea, the Israelite mix with a host of foreign nations to escape the foreign Egyptians[11]. This last one might not seem as clear, but it becomes so upon the next “crossing”. When the mix of Israelite and foreigners coming from Egypt finally do cross the Jordan to enter the land of the Canaan where the giants live, there are only two people left of the adults in the original group. Of all those who fled Egypt, the only adults from the original group who cross the Jordan as the Ark of the Covenant separates the waters are the two spies Joshua and Caleb[12]. Joshua, which means “savior”, is of course the name Jesus, and he would become the leader of Israel as they enter Canaan. As for the other fellow, one of the meanings of the name Caleb is “dog”. This meaning is emphasized in the text because Caleb is a foreigner, a Kenizite who is said to have been given the periphery, “the outskirts” of the land taken by Israel[13]. And so here we have two people entering the promised land, crossing the Jordan, Jesus and the Dog, Christ and the Foreigner, the “head” and the “body”. The term Kenizite, is one of those terms that will annoy modern scholars when I mention that it also has the “K-N” sound of Cain, Canaan, and Canine – just a coincidence worth mentioning.
The next examples of water crossing that will bring all of our discussion back on itself are the Jordan crossings of Elijah and Elisha[14]. This happens in the same place as their ancestors, near Jericho, the first city taken by Joshua. Elijah uses his garment, which was a “hairy garment”[15], a garment of skin, to separate the waters and then leave this world bodily (just as Enoch did before the flood and Moses did before the entry into Canaan), and then Elisha, having received Elijah’s garments with a double portion of his power, used the garments of skin to return to the side of Jericho. This story is of course symbolically linked to the flood and the Ark, as well as to the crossing of Joshua and Caleb with the Ark of the covenant, and so when we put all of these together we have: giants, garments of skin, arks, dogs, foreigners, and “the savior” who wields all these things in order cross the chaotic waters. What we have before us is an image of baptism, but in a deeper way the image of St-Christopher with Christ on his back crossing the river is also an image of the Church itself.
The relation of the foreign and marginal with excessive corporality, animality and disordered passions like cannibalism must be seen within a general traditional understanding of periphery. In a traditional view of the world, there is an analogy between personal and social periphery, both pictured in patristic terms as the garments of skin, those garments given to Adam and Eve which embody corporal existence. What appears at the edge of Man is analogous to what appears at the edge of the world both in spatial and temporal terms, so the barbarians, dog-headed men or other monsters on the spatial boundaries of civilization and the temporal end of civilization are akin to the death and animality which is the corporal spatial limit of an individual and the final temporal end of earthly life. The monsters as part of the garments of skin dwell on the edge of the world, and though they are dangerous, like Cerberus at the door of Hades, they also act as a kind of buffer between Man and the outer darkness. Just as our corporal bodies and its cycles are the source of our passions, they are also our “mortal shell” protecting us from death. It will therefore be by a more profound vision of the garments of skin across different ontological levels of fallen creation that we can make sense of St-Christopher[4].
St-Christopher in the Bible.
The relation of the Dog to periphery appears several places in the Bible. Dogs are of course an impure animal. They are seen licking the sores on Job’s skin[5]. They are excluded from the New Jerusalem[6]. They eat the body of the foreign queen Jezebel after she is thrown off the wall of the city[7]. The giant Goliath himself creates the St-Christopher dog/giant/foreigner analogy when he asks David: Am I a dog that you come at me with sticks?[8] The dog is used by Christ as a substitution for a foreigner when he tells the Samaritan that one should not give to dogs what is meant for the children[9]. The answer of the woman is also telling as she speaks of crumbs falling off the edge of the table, clearly marking the dog as the foreigner who is on the edge. Just these examples might be enough to explain St-Christopher symbolically, but there is still more.
The key to finding St-Christopher more profoundly in the Bible is the story of his crossing the river. In Scripture, there are several significant stories of water crossings, and through these appear the essential elements of the St-Christopher story as it relates to periphery and the garments of skin. As we search we must remember the movement of the garments of skins being both death and cure for death, both the cause of and the solution to the world of the fall. This means that the symbols will all be there in the different stories, but they can sometimes slip from one side to the other. The first example comes in the flood story, where Noah builds an ark, a shell full of animals to escape the world of fallen giants[10]. Then in the crossing of the Red Sea, the Israelite mix with a host of foreign nations to escape the foreign Egyptians[11]. This last one might not seem as clear, but it becomes so upon the next “crossing”. When the mix of Israelite and foreigners coming from Egypt finally do cross the Jordan to enter the land of the Canaan where the giants live, there are only two people left of the adults in the original group. Of all those who fled Egypt, the only adults from the original group who cross the Jordan as the Ark of the Covenant separates the waters are the two spies Joshua and Caleb[12]. Joshua, which means “savior”, is of course the name Jesus, and he would become the leader of Israel as they enter Canaan. As for the other fellow, one of the meanings of the name Caleb is “dog”. This meaning is emphasized in the text because Caleb is a foreigner, a Kenizite who is said to have been given the periphery, “the outskirts” of the land taken by Israel[13]. And so here we have two people entering the promised land, crossing the Jordan, Jesus and the Dog, Christ and the Foreigner, the “head” and the “body”. The term Kenizite, is one of those terms that will annoy modern scholars when I mention that it also has the “K-N” sound of Cain, Canaan, and Canine – just a coincidence worth mentioning.
The next examples of water crossing that will bring all of our discussion back on itself are the Jordan crossings of Elijah and Elisha[14]. This happens in the same place as their ancestors, near Jericho, the first city taken by Joshua. Elijah uses his garment, which was a “hairy garment”[15], a garment of skin, to separate the waters and then leave this world bodily (just as Enoch did before the flood and Moses did before the entry into Canaan), and then Elisha, having received Elijah’s garments with a double portion of his power, used the garments of skin to return to the side of Jericho. This story is of course symbolically linked to the flood and the Ark, as well as to the crossing of Joshua and Caleb with the Ark of the covenant, and so when we put all of these together we have: giants, garments of skin, arks, dogs, foreigners, and “the savior” who wields all these things in order cross the chaotic waters. What we have before us is an image of baptism, but in a deeper way the image of St-Christopher with Christ on his back crossing the river is also an image of the Church itself.
The relation between the crossing of waters and baptism is brought out in several stories of the New Testament, but regarding St-Christopher and the relation of the Church to the foreigner, we must look at the story of the Ethiopian eunuch[16]. Of all the conversions in the early Church, St-Luke chose this story for a reason. The full meaning can only be understood if we know what an Ethiopian and a Eunuch meant in the ancient world. Eunuchs played a role very similar to what we have been describing all along. Just like dogs, they were excluded from the temple. By castrating themselves they became strange hybrid creatures, neither male nor female. They were outcast, sterile and without descent. This is of course bolstered by the fact that eunuchs were often slaves. But because they had no place in society, no posterity to favor, they often became the “guards” of royalty or emperors. Even until Justinian, it was not rare to find a “buffer” of eunuchs around the emperor protecting his person and his affairs. Foreigners could also play this role, as the Varingians I mentioned earlier. This of course is the role of our Ethiopian Eunuch, as he is said to be responsible for the treasure of the queen of Ethiopia. Ethiopia in the ancient world was the home of the far away races, monstrous races even, and was the original land of the Sphinx. The detail that the Ethiopian was of the court of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians is meant to evoke for us the queen of Sheba who came to pose her riddles to Solomon. And so our Ethiopian Eunuch represents all of what the garments of skin represent. And just in case some doubts linger, an interesting detail in the story may convince. It is said that after Philip baptizes the Ethiopian, “The spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the Eunuch saw him no more”… This is of course the same phrase as in the story of Elijah and Elisha, that after Elijah ascended, Elisha “saw him no more”. The use of the same phrase is there to remind us of the connection, of how the story of the Eunuch and his baptism is related to all the “water crossing” stories I have mentioned, many of which have someone ascending as part of them, all of which have as a “vehicle” for the crossing some aspect of periphery, some image of the garments of skin. This ascending and leaving behind a “body” is also related to the Ascension of Christ leaving behind him the Church. There are many other stories, taken even from other cultures, where this structure appears. From Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops, the giant “Little John” fighting Robin Hood on a river to the three billy goats gruff, examples abound showing how deep and noetic the story is in human experience. The most recent clear example of this structure is the very successful book “Life of Pi”. As is usual in contemporary story telling which wants to push things further, here the movement of the garments of skin is brought to its extreme. In order to assure his “crossing”, the main character must rely on cannibalism imaged as a Tiger in the bottom of his boat. Cannibalism is of course one of the most common attributes given of the monstrous foreign races and is a very strong image of death.
Hopefully our trip will have proven how rather than simply being a series of accidents and exaggerations, the basic story and iconography of St-Christopher are perfectly coherent with Biblical narrative and tradition. Whether the dog headed warrior or the river crossing giant, both strains of iconography point to the deep meaning of flesh being a carrier of Christ, being “christophoros”, of the foreigner being the vehicle for the advancing of the Church to the ends of the Earth. Indeed, the story of St-Christopher is in fact an image of the Church itself, of the relationship of Christ to his Body, our own heart to our senses, our own logos to its shell.
Despite all of this, in the end, the big objection is still lingering: Yes, these stories are well and good, but in our savvy scientific age, no one believes in dog-headed men and races of giants anymore. St-Christopher remains an embarrassing trace of mistaken belief held in the past and should, for that reason alone, be sidetracked.
In my next article (part two) therefore, I will try to take the reader on an encounter with St-Christopher.
Hopefully our trip will have proven how rather than simply being a series of accidents and exaggerations, the basic story and iconography of St-Christopher are perfectly coherent with Biblical narrative and tradition. Whether the dog headed warrior or the river crossing giant, both strains of iconography point to the deep meaning of flesh being a carrier of Christ, being “christophoros”, of the foreigner being the vehicle for the advancing of the Church to the ends of the Earth. Indeed, the story of St-Christopher is in fact an image of the Church itself, of the relationship of Christ to his Body, our own heart to our senses, our own logos to its shell.
Despite all of this, in the end, the big objection is still lingering: Yes, these stories are well and good, but in our savvy scientific age, no one believes in dog-headed men and races of giants anymore. St-Christopher remains an embarrassing trace of mistaken belief held in the past and should, for that reason alone, be sidetracked.
In my next article (part two) therefore, I will try to take the reader on an encounter with St-Christopher.
Refrences:
[1] The most complete version of this story is in the Golden Legend: http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/golden234.htm
[2] David Woods, the Origin of the Cult of St-Christopher, 1999
[3] For an account of the legend, see Myths of the Dog-Man by David Gordon White, p.37-38, The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
[4] For a general treatment of the Garments of Skin in St-Gregory of Nyssa and other Church Fathers, see my article on the subject : http://pageaucarvings.com/2/post/2012/9/the-garments-of-skin.html
[5] Job 30:1
[6]Rev. 22:15
[7]2 Kings 9: 33-37
[8] 1 Sam. 17:43
[9] Mat. 15:26
[10] Gen. 6-7
[11] Ex. 14. The Egyptians are seen very explicitly as symbols of the garments of skin by St-Gregory of Nyssa, relating them to the general notion of the foreigner and foreskin. See for example Life of Moses, book II, section 38-39.
[12] Num. 14: 29-30
[13] Joshua 21: 11-13
[14] 2 Kings 2
[15] 2 Kings 1:8
[16] Acts 8: 26-40
Source: http://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/the-icon-of-st-christopher/
[1] The most complete version of this story is in the Golden Legend: http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/golden234.htm
[2] David Woods, the Origin of the Cult of St-Christopher, 1999
[3] For an account of the legend, see Myths of the Dog-Man by David Gordon White, p.37-38, The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
[4] For a general treatment of the Garments of Skin in St-Gregory of Nyssa and other Church Fathers, see my article on the subject : http://pageaucarvings.com/2/post/2012/9/the-garments-of-skin.html
[5] Job 30:1
[6]Rev. 22:15
[7]2 Kings 9: 33-37
[8] 1 Sam. 17:43
[9] Mat. 15:26
[10] Gen. 6-7
[11] Ex. 14. The Egyptians are seen very explicitly as symbols of the garments of skin by St-Gregory of Nyssa, relating them to the general notion of the foreigner and foreskin. See for example Life of Moses, book II, section 38-39.
[12] Num. 14: 29-30
[13] Joshua 21: 11-13
[14] 2 Kings 2
[15] 2 Kings 1:8
[16] Acts 8: 26-40
Source: http://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/the-icon-of-st-christopher/
Gnosticism - Dr. Peter Jones
Gnosticism vs. The Incarnation: The Ancient Battle Renewed
June 08, 2015
The contemporary sexual revolution is thoroughly Gnostic, attacking the institution of marriage, thwarting the conception of children, and denying the differences between men and women
By John B. Buescher
There is a tale, whose threads are too long to unravel here, of the meanderings of an idea through history—the idea that, as Nicolas Gómez-Davila parsed it, man is “a god imprisoned in the dull inertia of his flesh, or a god who elevates matter as his cry of victory.” This is the “knowledge” of both the old and the new Gnostics: We are not who we think we are, but gods imprisoned in matter. And knowing that we are gods is the condition for freedom, for it is only our wills that keep us from rising up divine.
If man is a god, then his essence is a will, exercised in purely unrestricted freedom. His sovereignty is expressed gratuitously. That sovereign will must be identical in everyone (or else it is not sovereign), and everything else about individuals exists as mere accidents, signs, or externalities. Indeed such things are impediments to which our wills are shackled.
The ancient form of the tale includes these basic propositions:
The prison in which we are shackled is matter. Yet matter does not matter. It is a dream into which we were born, and in which our spirits serve time in blind darkness, until death, or emancipation.
The creator of this world of matter was demented or malevolent. He is not the One who is the source of our spirit and our freedom.
Being born into this world is our problem. Exiting this world is the solution. Our bodies—and all the things that derive from being embodied and being pinned down into particularity—are features of our prison. That is most especially true of the most basic particularity of our bodies: the division into male and female. It is the primordial cleft, which ramifies throughout all other distinctions. In our highest form, we are androgynous.
Acting upon the sexual distinction, therefore, is the most basic sin. Above all, conceiving and bringing children into this fallen world of matter merely traps their free spirits and consigns them to bondage. When born, everyone has been conceived in the sin of his parents and is clothed in the prison uniform of his signifying flesh.
The ancient Gnostic responded by avoiding the generation of children. Some of them became extreme ascetics and totally celibate and even sacramentalized their fasting unto death. But some of them became “free spirits” who flouted all sexual taboos and customs—upon which the world’s prison bars were built—and engaged in every sort of sexual irregularity. It demonstrated the Gnostics’ contempt for the deep distinctions and features of the material world and how they were living purely in the spirit, and no longer bound by the world. It was a sign of contradiction to the fallen world, and was, in itself, a way to arise out of it, ringing the changes on what that world held to be sin, entering into it, but without being caught in it, and thereby wearing it out, exploding it from the inside, deconstructing it, turning the sexual act into something that would not result in the conception of children. Such acts too, for the Gnostic, could be sacramental.
Sexual activity engaged in by the unenlightened followed the logic of the prison world and resulted in its continuation into succeeding generations. Sexual activity that might be engaged in by the enlightened was done to arouse the “spirit,” but then to turn it to a purely spiritual purpose and away from the generation of children. The strategy was the uncoupling of the act from its worldly consequence, the generation of children.
At the very heart of this was the determination to undermine the foundation of this prison world. Whether the strategy was one of extreme asceticism or extreme licentiousness, the point was the same—the defeat of the material world by the freed spirit, whose essence was its own divine, sovereign will, unencumbered by any consequences that were not the expressions of its free choice.
The Current Gnosticism
This Gnostic logic underlies our contemporary sexual revolution, including the sacramentalizing of same-sex activities, the attack on traditional marriage, the evaluation of procreation as mere breeding, the treating of pregnancy as an unhealthy state that should be annulled or healed, the offering of contraception as a means to avoid that state, the evaluation of abortion as a way to avoid the supreme sin of bringing into the unwelcoming world a soul that would be marked with the sign of its iniquitous conception, and the offering of assistance—as a kindness—to those who would freely choose to end their lives.
Extending the logic: pregnancy is now an aesthetic project of the mother; the child in the womb is only clay until it magically becomes a person when the mother exercises her “choice” (made without interference from anyone else); one’s body itself as merely the expression of one’s sovereign choices; effacing the integrity of its natural state is an act of enlightened choice and a powerful contradiction to its given character; tattoos, piercings, and other mutilations and transmogrifications are therefore “beautiful” and a sign of “authenticity” because they clarify that the given material form of the body signifies nothing that is ultimately true.
The sovereign will of the individual that is the supposed center of gravity of this, however, is actually a thin reed. For the immutable and unassailable will that is supposed to be the individual’s is, by definition, unconditioned by accidents of time and place and history. It is, and can only be, Will. And for it to be free, it must act without regard to what any individual might need or think. It is for this reason that the “sovereign will” in our age has been so easily transferred to the tribe, the clan, the State, and the amorphous, collective People. When that Will is exercised, it clashes with and often negates the mere wills of individuals, who are not in perfect agreement with it, and who—by that very disagreement, are demonstrated to have not yet achieved enlightened freedom, and are guilty of “false consciousness,” or, as we might say, have not achieved true Gnosis. Their resistance must be annulled. In this is contained the follies and horrors of the past century, which are by no means over. Indeed, the Gnostic idea continues to advance from victory to victory.
The Gnostic Pose as True Christianity
The Gnostic idea mimics the Christian idea, and then, once inside the gates, throws off its disguise and destroys the city of the false god who created this prison world and entrapped free spirits within it. It presents the case for same-sex marriage, for example, as merely an extension of Christian charity to all, while hiding, until it is safe to unveil it, its animus for the procreative union of male and female. For the old Gnostics as well as the new ones, that demented god, the Patriarch, who created this world and who pretends to be the true God is the God of the Old Testament. And for them, the New Testament is precisely an outline that gives the strategy for overthrowing him.
The Gnostic idea is wholly opposed to the actual Christian idea, whose central pillar is the Incarnation of God in the person of a man, Jesus Christ. The Gnostic idea rejects the Incarnation, and replaces it with a narrative of disguised secrets and salvation via deception. It does not accept the reality of Christ’s true birth in the flesh, his true life as a man, fully embodied. Nor does it accept the reality of his true suffering and true death. It turns all this into a sham, a simulacrum of life and death, a show by a divine actor in disguise. For the good God could not embrace matter.
In short, it refuses the idea that the Creator of the world is good, and that the world He created is good, and that the body we have is good, and that it is good that we should go forth and multiply. It cannot allow that the natural world that God created is good and true and beautiful as it is, but only that it must be turned to the purposes of pure spirit, to our purposes, not to his. We must all strain to be “spiritual, but not religious.” We must look forward to the resurrection from the body. We all must become as angels, a process that proceeds through mimicking the Christian process of regeneration.
All of this makes the Gnostic idea a heresy. (Or, if it is not a heresy, then nothing is a heresy.) And its particular danger is its close resemblance to the Christian truth, so close that it has confused many Christians (lay and cleric both) into thinking that it is the Christian truth, rather than the anti-Christian “truth.” We are not gods. We are not pure spirits. We are not angels. We look forward to the resurrection of the body. Our wills are not the will of God. We enter into the most perilous territory when we try to redirect our own futures simply to suit our own wills. There is a tremendous cost in blood when we accept the “knowledge” of the serpent in Eden.
There are indeed dark “structures of oppression” in this material world. That oppression is not in accord with God’s will. The Christian looks to salvation and is convinced that we are ultimately in the world but not of the world, that our true and lasting home is heaven. But the Creator of this world made it good.
The truth of the Incarnation was not simply that Christ came, disguised as the lowest of men, to smuggle, into our prison, directions on how to flee it, but that, when he came, as fully God and fully man, God also re-affirmed and fulfilled His judgment that the world He had created, in all its variegated and sometimes frail forms, was good and, as the product of His handwork, was blessed. He confirmed that He loves the world, and loves us as a father loves his children. And so it is holy and righteous to be fruitful and multiply. Children are a gift from the good God, and their generation is blessed. Baptism is not just a negation of their fleshly generation, but is also a fulfillment of it—a regeneration.
Guarding Church doctrine, as Chesterton pointed out, has been like holding the reins of a team of horses who constantly wish to veer off to one side or the other. The Church guards a single mysterious truth in the Incarnation and has to keep a grip on two reins so that it does not deny that this world is redeemed but yet, that its redemption is incomplete until time itself is rolled up, and Christ comes again in glory. It will be his victory, not ours, no matter what we try to do to make his kingdom come. A utopian kingdom built solely by our own “divine” hands, will betray its goals—it will not be “inclusive” of all, but will dissolve each person into a mere class and ruthlessly divide humankind into the Elect and the Damned, the children of Light and the children of Darkness, the sainted class of victims (who have come to recognize themselves as such) and the damned class of oppressors. It will not usher in a millennium of progress, but a State of unyielding stasis that crushes variation and individual initiative.
Bootstrap Regeneration
The contemporary sexual revolution is thoroughly Gnostic. It attacks the institution of marriage and, therefore, the sacrament of Matrimony, which sanctifies and consecrates the production of children, challenging it by encouraging sexual activity that does not produce children, and then, most recently, by attempting to replace it with what denies that most fundamental material artifice of the demented creator god—sexual difference. Nevertheless, perhaps the ultimate source of antagonism between the Gnostic idea being played out in the sexual revolution and the Christian idea is not centered around the sacrament of Matrimony, but rather the sacrament of Baptism—regeneration.
That portion of our tale also has threads that are too long and twisted to unravel here, and involved such things as the troubadours of Southern France and Italy traveling in once-Cathar (and so Gnostic) regions, praising the unhooking of marriage from “true,” “spiritual” love, which did not bear material fruit. It also involved the spread of an iconoclastic idea of limitless human freedom, conveyed in mostly secret conventicles along the Rhine and in the Low Countries of Europe.
It eventuated in a theological crisis that crystalized around the sacraments, and, in so doing, pointed to a loss of conviction in the truth of the Incarnation. In this loss the “imprisonment” of the holy, of the free spirit, in mere matter—the bread of the Eucharist, the water of Baptism, the sexual act of male and female that produced children—seemed to be repulsive and even blasphemous. All that was progressively denied.
So then how were humans to escape from this prison of sinful materiality, in which they were interwined from the very moment of their conception, their generation? Traditionally, a Christian would say one was freed by the sacrament of Baptism. That was regeneration. And afterwards, by the continuing graces of that regeneration, one would continue and deepen its effects in one’s life through repentance and inner reconversion.
However, for a Gnostic (or whatever he called himself), the sacrament of Baptism seemed a sham. It was effected through the “matter” of water, and it was done through the power of the materially-visible and therefore fundamentally corrupt Church, and it could be effected without the will, the spirit, of the person being obviously involved—such as in infant baptism. At best the sacrament was a mere metaphor for something purely spiritual and internal. At worst, it was a delusion that could never deliver what it promised.
But if it could not really effect the regeneration of man, what could? Such regeneration would be something wrought wholly out of the individual’s fully formed (and divine) will. It would also be entirely spiritual and unmixed with the material. Yet it would allow the man-god not only to escape “the dull inertia of his fleshly prison,” but also “to hold up matter as his cry of victory.”
The full force of the logic only appeared gradually—showing itself sporadically and half-hidden until the Enlightenment and then the 18th and 19th century European revolutions. There, “regeneration” became much more than an individual matter (as I said, “individual” freedom is a frail reed that is quickly broken and then consumed in the bonfire of the collective will), but rather something that communities, states, “peoples” were required to undergo.
But on the individual level, it meant that regeneration would be something that occurred incrementally, progressively, over the course of generations. This would be a “progression” that was always ascending higher in spirit, just as in the Gnostic description of the ascent of the soul into pure spirit. Each generation would provide the next generation with a successively more refined, purer, and more spiritual start. The acquired virtues of the parents would be passed on to the next generation, which would begin their upward progress from there. Education, properly done, and technology would accomplish the task. But each generation would also need self-examination and self-criticism, struggle sessions, and re-education camps. Sometimes the transition to the next stage would be easy, but often it would be difficult and only effected by a violent and revolutionary inner or outer crisis. For at each stage in this successive ascent, the further stage would be still hidden and unclear, and its definition would have to come from outside and above the earlier stage’s view. In this way, it was thought, man could bootstrap his own salvation. The sequence of generation and then regeneration would be overcome: the regeneration of the parents would affect the subsequent generation of their children.
Along these lines, by the middle of the 19th century, many had convinced themselves that the inner virtues, the thoughts, and the feelings of a man and a woman during sexual intercourse would have a dominating effect on the formation of the child they conceived: if their thoughts, attitudes, and perceptions were spiritual and virtuous and edifying, then the very physical body and the mental formation of their child would be elevated. If not—which is to say, if the sexual act were not entirely the result of a free choice of the unencumbered will (particularly that of the woman)—then the child would bear the deep marks of deformation in his or her mind and body. The child was, therefore, entirely the product of the spirit of the parents, which would grow more perfect and spiritualized as the generations proceeded. Mostly, children were not to be generated, at least not “haphazardly,” but if they were, they had to be bred “better,” and this could be done only if the child’s parents had already been spiritually and mentally regenerated. This “Lamarckian” notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is the model for the Gnostic overcoming of our fallen condition. Instead of generation, followed by regeneration, it inverted the sequence: (parental) regeneration, followed by generation (of the child).
The Gnostic Ascent of Man
Everything about the sexual revolution flowed from this: all the encouragement of sex that had no consequences except the stirring of the passion and “vital energies,” the concern to prevent “unwanted” pregnancy, all the exotic physical techniques (for arousing but then withholding and “transmuting” the semen) and all the chemical and mechanical technologies to accomplish that, all the conviction that the mother’s “choice” turned a lifeless mass of tissue into a person of inestimable and divine value, all the segregation of the “breeding” of children from the spiritual (read: made materially inconsequential) act of sex. In general, one might say, the goal was for men to hold in their semen and transform it into spirit, and for women to generate children by sleeping with spirits. All children would then be “immaculate conceptions,” freed from what, today, is being referred to as the “rape culture.” Is this not, in allegedly “secular” and “progressive” terms, merely an aping of something else? Something that Monsignor Ronald Knox, in The Creed in Slow Motion, described this way:
You see, it is as if the message of Gabriel first imprinted on her thoughts the image of the Saviour who was to come, and thereupon the reality of that image began to form itself in her womb. … the Word was made flesh in order that we, creatures of the flesh, might be brought, once more, under the power of the Spirit.
Most of all, this Gnostic “Ascent of Man” requires that only the regenerated should generate children. If others did, the children would be marked with sin and doomed to a world of woe, a destiny so bad, one could say, that they would be better off being put out of their misery, and “released” thereby from their fleshly encasement. At the end of this logic is not only eugenics and euthanasia, but a regime in which only the Elect are allowed to have children—practically speaking, the “regenerated” (read “Progressive”) State would license them—and when they are born their well being and education will be entirely in the hands of the State, not their biological parents. Are these intentions not clear enough already to anyone who can read the newspapers?
And who, today, are those convinced they have been regenerated in this way? It is not difficult to pick them out. They are the ones who, like one reporter who, when commenting on a couple who had a dozen children, snarked, “Don’t they know anything about sex?”—an absurd question on its face, but clearly one that attempted to place the couple as ignorant troglodytes and to place himself as “knowing” about sex, when, in fact, what he “knew” about sex was how to prevent conception. From his “raised consciousness,” he and his comrades will, if they get the chance, prevent those of “false consciousness” from multiplying. It is a eugenics and euthanasia club, with a program for breeding better babies, for taking our evolution into our own hands, for regenerating the human race. For they “know” that gender is merely an adventitious social construct of the oppressive and malevolent “Patriarchy.” They know that the world is shot through with injustice: it is the creation and continuation of a primordial rape by a deluded and lustful Patriarch. Having attended mandatory “sexual harassment orientations,” they know that every act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is, consciously or unconsciously, an echo of that rape.
They know that Jesus was a freedom fighter and social revolutionary, intent on “queering” the customs of the world, and thus healing and reconciling the evil effects of that rape. They know that he was a savior because he was a sign of contradiction and the stone that the builders of the world prison rejected, who shall be the cornerstone of the New Age.
This is the culture that has now arrived. Despite what some may think, it is not devoid of a deeply “religious conviction,” but the conviction is a Gnostic one. And it is not Christian. It is a most profoundly twisted Christian heresy. And Christianity cannot assimilate it or compromise with it, except with fatal results. But that is in fact the Gnostics’ goal.
Star Wars and the Ancient Religion
By Dr. Peter Jones
The appearance of a new episode of the Star Wars film series is an important moment for Christian witness. To be sure, we can shrug our shoulders, since Star Wars is old news. Or we can enthusiastically introduce our grandchildren to what we might think is a beloved, harmless yarn. Or we can—and should—discover in the series an occasion to sharpen our presentation of the gospel message and help our children and grandchildren, and anyone else who might be interested, to understand the culture in which they live.
In this famous and creative saga, which we must respect for its artistic value, we find many positive ideals—bravery, friendship, love, and spirituality, and others—which help explain the success of the series. However, in examining Star Wars’ account of the mystery and nobility of human life, the Bible’s answer, in comparison, emerges with incomparably more convincing power.
The Star Wars Phenomenon
Answering questions of morality and spirituality was the goal of George Lucas when he created Star Wars. In the 1970s, in the heyday of secular humanism, people were hungry for spiritual truth. Lucas realized that stories were more powerful than intellectual theories—especially for children. He intended to produce a children’s fairy tale set in outer space as a “teaching tool” for the re-creation of “the classic cosmic mysteries.” In so doing, he influenced audiences young and old and deeply affected the last few decades of Western civilization. The new films will no doubt extend that influence into the next generations.
Understanding Worldview
As millions of people stream, perhaps naively, into theaters this weekend to reconnect with the powerful Star Wars adult fairy tale, most of them will be unaware of the worldview that gives this saga its structure and coherence. The term worldview simply means the way we think about the world without stopping to think about it. The fish doesn’t need to think about the water in which it swims. I’ve spent much of my teaching and writing years showing that there are only two ways to see the world. I call them “Oneism” and “Twoism,” which is another way of describing what the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 1:25. He says that there are only two ways to be human—we either worship nature (in a thousand different ways) or we worship the Creator. If you can count from one to two you can understand worldview. Worship of nature is Oneism because nature is all there is and everything is made of the same stuff. “All is one!” This is the essence of a pagan worldview. Worship of the Creator means that in all of reality there are two kinds of existence: the uncreated Creator, and everything else, which is created. That is the worldview of Twoism.
By this standard, Star Wars is clearly Oneist. In spite of the fun elements we all enjoy, the message of the film is self-consciously pagan. If this sounds harsh, check out the following elements.
A Oneist Approach to Morality, Creation, Spirituality, Redemption, and Death
Here are some of the Oneist principles we find in the Star Wars movies:
- Morality is what you make it. The Force is either good or evil, depending on how you tap into it via your emotions. There is no objective distinction between good or evil.
- Existence creates itself. Obi-Wan Kenobi says, “The Force is an energy field created by all living things.” There is no Creator/creature distinction.
- Spirituality is found within, not revealed from the outside. Luke Skywalker must trust his feelings, empty his mind of questions, and “feel the Force flowing through him” in order to create his own truth.
- In redemption, Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader optimistically “saves” the galaxy and destroys the Emperor, though evil cannot ultimately be eliminated, because evil is an integral part of a Oneist world.
- According to Yoda, death is eternal sleep.
Lucas said he desired to produce something spiritual, but the spirituality he proposes is clearly not based on biblical Twoism. This is most obviously the case when the constant pagan blessing “May the Force be with you” replaces the typical biblical blessing, “The Lord be with you.” For Lucas, God is a “force”—not a person. Nature, containing that “force,” is part of the Force. God the transcendent Creator, who is separate from creation, does not exist. This makes Star Wars, at the deepest level, Oneist.
But just how Oneist? To answer this question, we need a little background. You may want to watch the Ligonier teaching series Only Two Religions, especially part three, “Carl Jung’s Alternative Spirituality.” Very simply, Lucas’ terms “dark side” and “light side” come directly from Carl Jung. Jung was an anti-Christian Swiss psychologist of the last century. His enormous influence planted seeds of Oneist pagan thinking that now flower vigorously in our culture. Part of Jung’s legacy is Star Wars.
George Lucas picked up Carl Jung’s ideas from a man he called his “mentor” and “friend,” Joseph Campbell, who was a committed disciple of Jung. A highly influential thinker in his own right, Campbell rejected Christianity and became an expert in pagan myths. He produced a highly successful PBS documentary series, The Power of Myth (1988), filmed, in part, at Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch.
It was Jung who introduced the “spiritual,” pagan myths about joining the dark and light sides. For him, this meant the rejection of the biblical Christ and the worship of the Gnostic God, Abraxas, who was half-man and half-beast—a god who combines all opposites. This joining of the dark side and light side, of good and evil, of God and Satan (in his estimation), is what Joseph Campbell called “the monomyth” of “the ancient religion,” which he taught to Lucas. Thus, Darth Vader is “the balancer” of the light and dark forces.
Though Lucas doesn’t go as deeply into such ideas as did Jung and Campbell, he popularizes their ideas effectively. We see the joining of opposites in the following areas:
- everything is relative;
- there is no distinction between animals, humans, and machines;
- there are no moral absolutes;
- there is no unique divine/human mediator;
- there is no God, separate from us, who is creator and redeemer.
Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727), one of the West’s greatest scientists, said many years ago: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being… . This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all.” Thanks in part to Lucas, many now believe that humanity is that intelligent and powerful Being, empowered by the Force, and that we will save ourselves.
Will the ‘Force Awaken’ with the Same Force This Time?
Doubtless, The Force Awakens will attempt to capture a new generation of naive myth lovers. The trailer declares: “The Force is calling to you. Just let it in.”
With enough money and imagination, there is every reason to think that the Force will reawaken pagan thinking in a new generation of Western believers who have already bought $50 million worth of tickets for the December release. Moreover, the appeal of paganism has certainly not diminished since the ‘70s and ‘80s. The movie is bound to catch the imagination of those who now call themselves “spiritual but not religious.” Our contemporary world now embraces Eastern pagan spirituality:
- In Iceland, even atheists are joining the fastest-growing religion, Zuism, which is a pagan faith from ancient Sumeria.
- Faerie Magazine (for people who believe in fairies) is the nineteenth most popular lifestyle title of the 157 sold at Barnes & Noble.
- Millions of Americans practice forms of Eastern meditation and yoga to be released from the bondage of opposites and to succeed in joining the dark and light sides of existence.
- In rediscovering “the Force,” these eager spiritual ticket-holders believe they will find themselves “in heaven,” as one fan recently said.
A large part of my life has been dominated by Star Wars imagery, as I have published a trilogy responding to the pagan phenomenon that it represents. Thus, I wrote The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back, Spirit Wars, and Return of the Rabbi (as an ebook—in printed form, Capturing the Pagan Mind). These “wars of the spirit,” popularly revived by Lucas, represent, as noted above, the only two spiritualities offered: the “monomyth” of pagan Oneism or the historic gospel of biblical Twoism. With Stars Wars, we find ourselves at the very center of this timeless spiritual struggle.
To Go or Not to Go
I believe there are good reasons for viewing this film. We can certainly respect its artistic and entertainment value. Galactic battle scenes and human drama are entertaining. But also, by seeing this movie, Christians can sharpen their understanding of both contemporary culture and their appreciation of the Christian faith, allowing them to see in antithetical clarity both the Christian message and the message of Star Wars in order to present the gospel in a fresh way for our time.
In doing this, we follow what Christians have done throughout the ages. We need to realize that when Obi-Wan Kenobi instructs Luke to follow “the ancient religion,” this is a clear technical reference (for those in the know) to “pre-Christian paganism.” The gauntlet is thrown down in a call to theological confrontation. But this ancient, modernized “religion,” while implicitly claiming to be true, creates immense problems and gives no satisfying answers to the major mysteries of life:
- No impersonal force or “it” can meet the deep affective and moral needs of human persons.
- No human or impersonal source can give an adequate account of origins, since such an account fails to provide a convincing explanation of either personhood or of intelligence, on which the universe, and this movie, in particular, are based—including the love between Luke and his father and the technological wizardry that makes Star Wars so much fun.
At this relaunch of the seductive Star Wars myth, with its declaration that “all is finally well because all is one,” the world needs to hear not a clever myth. It needs to hear a bold proclamation of an historical fact—the fact that in Christ God defeated the darkness of the evil empire of human sin. He now grants real deliverance to needy human souls and a real promise—not of impersonal “eternal sleep”—but of a future eternal resurrected life and a face-to-face meeting with Him, our Maker and loving Redeemer.
Dr. Peter Jones is executive director of truthXchange, a ministry that exists to recognize and respond to the rising tide of neopaganism. He has authored several books and is the teacher on the series Only Two Religions.
Source: http://www.ligonier.org/blog/star-wars-ancient-religion/
Gnosticism and the Struggle for the World’s Soul
By Father Alphonso Aguilar
What do Harry Potter, the Star Wars series, The Matrix, Masonry, New Age and the Raelian cult, which claims to have cloned the first baby, have in common?
Their ideological soil. Identical esoteric ideas suf-fuse the novels, the movies, the lodges, the “alternative spirituality” and the cloning “atheistic religion,” and this ideological soil has a name — Gnosticism.
“Gnosticism” is an eerie word whose meaning eludes our minds. I often meet Catholics who have heard the term but have only a foggy idea of what it means. Perhaps Gnosticism itself is foggy.
Yet, whether we understand it or not, Gnosticism may be, at the beginning of the third millennium, the most dangerous enemy to our Christian faith. Notice, I'm not saying Star Wars or Harry Potter is the danger. They provide us with good lessons and fine entertainment. They are just two signs of the power of the real enemy: Gnosticism.
Why? What is Gnosticism?
In one dense but masterful summary, we find the essential aspects of Gnosticism. In his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II writes:
“A separate issue is the return of ancient Gnostic ideas under the guise of the so-called New Age. We cannot delude ourselves that this will lead toward a renewal of religion. It is only a new way of practicing Gnosticism — that attitude of the spirit that, in the name of a profound knowledge of God, results in distorting his word and replacing it with purely human words. Gnosticism never completely abandoned the realm of Christianity. Instead, it has always existed side by side with Christianity, sometimes taking the shape of philosophical movement, but more often assuming the characteristics of a religion or para-religion in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian.”
Let's examine what the Holy Father is saying about Gnosticism.
‘Secret Knowledge”?
First, its nature. Strictly speaking, Gnosticism was an esoteric religious movement of the first centuries A.D., a movement that rivaled Christianity. In a broader sense, it is an esoteric knowledge of higher religious and philosophic truths to be acquired by an elite group. John Paul alludes to the first meaning with the phrase “ancient Gnostic ideas” and to the second as an “attitude of the spirit” that “has always existed side by side with Christianity.”
A Gnostic is one who has gnosis (a Greek word for “knowledge”) — a visionary or mystical “secret knowledge” capable of joining the human being to the divine mystery. Gnostics, the Pope remarked, distort God's word “in the name of a profound knowledge of God.” What is this “knowledge” they claim to have?
The Gnostic worldview is dualistic. Reality consists of two irreducible elements: one good, the spiritual world (the realm of light); and the other evil, matter (the realm of darkness). Two supreme powers or gods oppose each other — the unknowable and inef-fable god, from whom a series of lesser divinities emanated, and the evil god, or demiurge, who produced the universe from foul matter and possesses it with his evil demons.
Man is composed of body, soul and spirit. The spirit is man's true self, a “divine spark,” a portion of the godhead. In a tragic fall, man's true self, or spirit, was thrown into this dark world and imprisoned in each individual's body and soul. The demiurge and the demons keep man's spirit as a slave of the material world, ignorant of his “divine” condition. Hence the need for a spiritual savior, a messiah or “Christ,” to offer redeeming gnosis. This savior is a guide, a master who teaches a few “spiritual” people — the Gnostics — about their true spiritual selves and helps them to wake up from the dream world they live in. The Gnostics would be released from the material world, the non-Gnostics doomed to reincarnation.
What is an example of how these beliefs are embodied in popular stories? Consider the Star Wars movies. There is much good in them. The stories are admirable in many ways. But they are chock-full of Gnosticism.
Star Wars is the clash between the two supreme powers of the universe — “the force” and the “dark side of the force,” which is exploited by the “emperor” (the demiurge) and his demons (Darth Vader, the siths). The Gnostic heroes are the Jedi, who possess the “secret knowledge” of their own spiritual powers; unlike the non-Gnostic, they are able to use “the force” well. Each Jedi has a master, who trains him to acquire this redeeming gnosis. Ben Kenobi, for instance, was for a time the master of Anakin and Luke Skywalker. The greatest spiritual guide in the saga is Yoda, a respected senior member of the Jedi council and a general in the clone wars.
As Christ's followers, we must sort out the good seed from the weeds (cf. Matthew 13:24-30). I propose a distinction between the Gnostic values and its philosophy.
Gnostics promote, without a doubt, positive values. They draw a clear-cut separation between good and evil, stress man's spiritual dimension, instill high and noble ideals, foster courage and concern for others, respect nature, reject materialism and often reject hedonism, too.
Part One of Two.
The second part of this series will examine Gnosticism in contemporary culture and give tips on how to spot it.
Such values shine like pearls in an age of moral relativism that thirsts for gain, the ephemeral, the hedonistic. Aren't these some of the virtues and ideas we love in Star Wars and Harry Potter?
The other side of the coin, however, is not so positive. The good values are rooted in a Gnostic philosophical understanding of man, God and the world that is, as the Pope put it, “in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian.” Why?
Note the opposite views. The Christian Creator is love — a Trinity of persons who wants to establish with us a personal relationship of love — quite different from that unknowable God, usually conceived, like the Star Wars “force,” as an impersonal energy to be manipulated.
The God of Revelation made everything good — the angels, the world, our body and soul. Evil is not a force of the same rank as God; rather, it springs from angels’ and men's personal free choice. Salvation is offered by God in Christ, man's only redeemer.
Salvation is a grace — a free gift from God that Man can neither deserve nor earn. It is not gnosis, “secret knowledge” we can acquire by ourselves with the help of mere human guides or Christlike figures. In short, the Christian religion is a “dialogue” of love between God and man, not a self-centered “monologue” in which man divinizes himself. That's why John Paul says Gnosticism cannot lead “toward a renewal of religion.”
It distorts God's word, “replacing it with purely human words.”
Then and Now
Finally, the Pope alludes to the historic span and manifestations of this ideology. “Gnosticism,” he says, “never completely abandoned the realm of Christianity ... sometimes taking the shape of philosophical movement but more often assuming the characteristics of a religion or para-religion.”
Let's look at a few representative Gnostic movements in history.
With the rise of Christianity, ancient esoteric ideas developed into Gnostic syncretism. Thus, in the first centuries A.D., the Apostles and the Church Fathers had to combat several “Christian” Gnostic religious systems, such as those of Cerinthus, Manander, Saturninus, Valentinus, Basilides, Ptolemaeus and the ones contained in the apocryphal gospels: of truth and perfection, and of Judas (Iscariot), Philip and Thomas.
The third-century dualist Mani chaean church or religion spread from Persia throughout the Middle East, China, southern Europe and northern Africa, where the young Augustine temporarily became a convert.
Teachings similar to Manichaeism resurfaced during the Middle Ages in Europe in groups such as the Paulicians (Armenia, seventh century), the Bogomilists (Bulgaria, 10th century), the Cathars or Albigensians (southern France, 12th century), the Jewish Cabala and the metaphysical speculation surrounding alchemy.
Modern times witnessed the resurgence of Gnosticism in philosophical thought — the Enlightenment, Hegel's idealism, some existentialist currents, Nazism, Jungian psychology, the theosophical society and Freemasonry.
More recently, Gnosticism has become popular through successful films and novels, such as Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Matrix. It has also gained followers among the ranks of ordinary people through pseudo-religious “movements,” such as the New Age and the Raelian cult.
These contemporary Gnostic expressions should certainly inspire us in the good values they promote. At the same time, we should be cautious — examine their philosophical background and reject what is incompatible with our Christian faith.
At the beginning of the third millennium we seem to face the same old clash between Christianity and Gnosticism. Both fight to conquer the “soul” of this world — the minds and hearts of peoples and cultures.
For this reason, defeating Gnosticism has become an essential task of the New Evangelization. “Against the spirit of the world,” the Holy Father says in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, “the Church takes up anew each day a struggle that is none other than the struggle for the world's soul.”
Father Alfonso Aguilar teaches philosophy in Thornwood, New York, and can be reached at: [email protected].
By Father Alphonso Aguilar
What do Harry Potter, the Star Wars series, The Matrix, Masonry, New Age and the Raelian cult, which claims to have cloned the first baby, have in common?
Their ideological soil. Identical esoteric ideas suf-fuse the novels, the movies, the lodges, the “alternative spirituality” and the cloning “atheistic religion,” and this ideological soil has a name — Gnosticism.
“Gnosticism” is an eerie word whose meaning eludes our minds. I often meet Catholics who have heard the term but have only a foggy idea of what it means. Perhaps Gnosticism itself is foggy.
Yet, whether we understand it or not, Gnosticism may be, at the beginning of the third millennium, the most dangerous enemy to our Christian faith. Notice, I'm not saying Star Wars or Harry Potter is the danger. They provide us with good lessons and fine entertainment. They are just two signs of the power of the real enemy: Gnosticism.
Why? What is Gnosticism?
In one dense but masterful summary, we find the essential aspects of Gnosticism. In his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II writes:
“A separate issue is the return of ancient Gnostic ideas under the guise of the so-called New Age. We cannot delude ourselves that this will lead toward a renewal of religion. It is only a new way of practicing Gnosticism — that attitude of the spirit that, in the name of a profound knowledge of God, results in distorting his word and replacing it with purely human words. Gnosticism never completely abandoned the realm of Christianity. Instead, it has always existed side by side with Christianity, sometimes taking the shape of philosophical movement, but more often assuming the characteristics of a religion or para-religion in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian.”
Let's examine what the Holy Father is saying about Gnosticism.
‘Secret Knowledge”?
First, its nature. Strictly speaking, Gnosticism was an esoteric religious movement of the first centuries A.D., a movement that rivaled Christianity. In a broader sense, it is an esoteric knowledge of higher religious and philosophic truths to be acquired by an elite group. John Paul alludes to the first meaning with the phrase “ancient Gnostic ideas” and to the second as an “attitude of the spirit” that “has always existed side by side with Christianity.”
A Gnostic is one who has gnosis (a Greek word for “knowledge”) — a visionary or mystical “secret knowledge” capable of joining the human being to the divine mystery. Gnostics, the Pope remarked, distort God's word “in the name of a profound knowledge of God.” What is this “knowledge” they claim to have?
The Gnostic worldview is dualistic. Reality consists of two irreducible elements: one good, the spiritual world (the realm of light); and the other evil, matter (the realm of darkness). Two supreme powers or gods oppose each other — the unknowable and inef-fable god, from whom a series of lesser divinities emanated, and the evil god, or demiurge, who produced the universe from foul matter and possesses it with his evil demons.
Man is composed of body, soul and spirit. The spirit is man's true self, a “divine spark,” a portion of the godhead. In a tragic fall, man's true self, or spirit, was thrown into this dark world and imprisoned in each individual's body and soul. The demiurge and the demons keep man's spirit as a slave of the material world, ignorant of his “divine” condition. Hence the need for a spiritual savior, a messiah or “Christ,” to offer redeeming gnosis. This savior is a guide, a master who teaches a few “spiritual” people — the Gnostics — about their true spiritual selves and helps them to wake up from the dream world they live in. The Gnostics would be released from the material world, the non-Gnostics doomed to reincarnation.
What is an example of how these beliefs are embodied in popular stories? Consider the Star Wars movies. There is much good in them. The stories are admirable in many ways. But they are chock-full of Gnosticism.
Star Wars is the clash between the two supreme powers of the universe — “the force” and the “dark side of the force,” which is exploited by the “emperor” (the demiurge) and his demons (Darth Vader, the siths). The Gnostic heroes are the Jedi, who possess the “secret knowledge” of their own spiritual powers; unlike the non-Gnostic, they are able to use “the force” well. Each Jedi has a master, who trains him to acquire this redeeming gnosis. Ben Kenobi, for instance, was for a time the master of Anakin and Luke Skywalker. The greatest spiritual guide in the saga is Yoda, a respected senior member of the Jedi council and a general in the clone wars.
As Christ's followers, we must sort out the good seed from the weeds (cf. Matthew 13:24-30). I propose a distinction between the Gnostic values and its philosophy.
Gnostics promote, without a doubt, positive values. They draw a clear-cut separation between good and evil, stress man's spiritual dimension, instill high and noble ideals, foster courage and concern for others, respect nature, reject materialism and often reject hedonism, too.
Part One of Two.
The second part of this series will examine Gnosticism in contemporary culture and give tips on how to spot it.
Such values shine like pearls in an age of moral relativism that thirsts for gain, the ephemeral, the hedonistic. Aren't these some of the virtues and ideas we love in Star Wars and Harry Potter?
The other side of the coin, however, is not so positive. The good values are rooted in a Gnostic philosophical understanding of man, God and the world that is, as the Pope put it, “in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian.” Why?
Note the opposite views. The Christian Creator is love — a Trinity of persons who wants to establish with us a personal relationship of love — quite different from that unknowable God, usually conceived, like the Star Wars “force,” as an impersonal energy to be manipulated.
The God of Revelation made everything good — the angels, the world, our body and soul. Evil is not a force of the same rank as God; rather, it springs from angels’ and men's personal free choice. Salvation is offered by God in Christ, man's only redeemer.
Salvation is a grace — a free gift from God that Man can neither deserve nor earn. It is not gnosis, “secret knowledge” we can acquire by ourselves with the help of mere human guides or Christlike figures. In short, the Christian religion is a “dialogue” of love between God and man, not a self-centered “monologue” in which man divinizes himself. That's why John Paul says Gnosticism cannot lead “toward a renewal of religion.”
It distorts God's word, “replacing it with purely human words.”
Then and Now
Finally, the Pope alludes to the historic span and manifestations of this ideology. “Gnosticism,” he says, “never completely abandoned the realm of Christianity ... sometimes taking the shape of philosophical movement but more often assuming the characteristics of a religion or para-religion.”
Let's look at a few representative Gnostic movements in history.
With the rise of Christianity, ancient esoteric ideas developed into Gnostic syncretism. Thus, in the first centuries A.D., the Apostles and the Church Fathers had to combat several “Christian” Gnostic religious systems, such as those of Cerinthus, Manander, Saturninus, Valentinus, Basilides, Ptolemaeus and the ones contained in the apocryphal gospels: of truth and perfection, and of Judas (Iscariot), Philip and Thomas.
The third-century dualist Mani chaean church or religion spread from Persia throughout the Middle East, China, southern Europe and northern Africa, where the young Augustine temporarily became a convert.
Teachings similar to Manichaeism resurfaced during the Middle Ages in Europe in groups such as the Paulicians (Armenia, seventh century), the Bogomilists (Bulgaria, 10th century), the Cathars or Albigensians (southern France, 12th century), the Jewish Cabala and the metaphysical speculation surrounding alchemy.
Modern times witnessed the resurgence of Gnosticism in philosophical thought — the Enlightenment, Hegel's idealism, some existentialist currents, Nazism, Jungian psychology, the theosophical society and Freemasonry.
More recently, Gnosticism has become popular through successful films and novels, such as Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Matrix. It has also gained followers among the ranks of ordinary people through pseudo-religious “movements,” such as the New Age and the Raelian cult.
These contemporary Gnostic expressions should certainly inspire us in the good values they promote. At the same time, we should be cautious — examine their philosophical background and reject what is incompatible with our Christian faith.
At the beginning of the third millennium we seem to face the same old clash between Christianity and Gnosticism. Both fight to conquer the “soul” of this world — the minds and hearts of peoples and cultures.
For this reason, defeating Gnosticism has become an essential task of the New Evangelization. “Against the spirit of the world,” the Holy Father says in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, “the Church takes up anew each day a struggle that is none other than the struggle for the world's soul.”
Father Alfonso Aguilar teaches philosophy in Thornwood, New York, and can be reached at: [email protected].
An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality - Ester de Waal
A Nearly Forgotten History: Women Deaconesses in the Armenian Church
By Knarik Meneshian
On Sunday afternoon, June 9, 2013, the Chicago chapter of the Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Cultural Society presented a program on a segment of Armenian Church history at the Armenian All Saints Church and Community Center’s Shahnazarian Hall in Glenview, Ill. After welcoming words by the chapter’s chairman, Haroutiun Mikaelian, Ani Vartanian introduced the participants in the program, followed by the presentation of crosses from the Eastern Prelacy to the female members of the choir who had served the church in that capacity for 25 years. Lusine Torian recited the poem “The Armenian Church” by Vahan Tekeyan, followed by Lousin K. Tokmakjian’s piano rendition of “Nor Dzaghig,” a sharagan (or psalm). Following the day’s event, refreshments were served.
The speaker of the day, Knarik O. Meneshian, presented a lecture and slideshow titled “The Armenian Deaconess and Her Forgotten Role in the Armenian Apostolic Church.” After Meneshian thanked the Chicago Chapter of the Hamazkayin Educational and Cultural Society for inviting her to present her lecture, and greeted the guests, she began her talk with the following introductory remarks:
“Since childhood, I’ve always had a reverence and love for the Armenian Church. I joined the choir when I was a teenager. The Armenian All Saints Apostolic Church, as some of you will recall, was on Lemoyn Street in Chicago at the time. One day, Der Hayr Maronian, the parish priest then, handed me a scroll and told me to go home and study it and be prepared to read it the following week. It was a long scroll, and beautifully handwritten in Armenian. The following week during church service, I was motioned to ascend the altar where I unrolled the scroll and read from the Book of Daniel (Danieli Girk). I’ve never forgotten the serene feeling that came over me in church that day as I read to the congregation.
“Before starting my presentation, I would like to recount a scene from a historical novel I read several years ago on the American Indians. The scene began with an entire village walking—again in search of better hunting grounds. The village elder followed behind the group carrying a tattered bundle on his back. Once in a great while, he slipped something into his bundle, but he never removed anything from it. The people often wondered what it was that he carried in the bag and guarded so carefully. One day, someone asked, ‘Oh, Elder, what is in your bundle? It looks so heavy and seems such a burden to carry.’ The village elder paused and then beckoned everyone to sit down. As they sat around him, the elder gently placed the bundle on the ground and reverently kneeled before it and said, ‘This bag, my people, contains our history. Without it, we would not know who we are; what we are.’
“Now, let’s glimpse into our own history, a segment of our history nearly forgotten: the women deacons of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
“After Armenia accepted Christianity as the state religion in 301 AD, magnificent things began to take place in the country. Churches were built, some over the ruins of pagan temples. Tatev Vank, for example, was built atop a pagan ruin and Holy Etchmiadzin over a Zoroastrian temple. The alphabet was invented. The Bible was translated into Armenian. The arts, education, and literature flourished. Books such as The History of Vartanank by Yeghishe, The History of Armenia by Khorenatsi, and later, The Book of Prayers by Narekatsi, were written.
“Susan, a woman scribe, copied Yeghishe’s and Khorenatsi’s books, and the scribe Goharine copied Narekatsi’s book. Sharagans were written, some by women, notably Sahagadoukht, a poetess and composer who wrote some of the sharagans for the Armenian Church and taught men while seated behind a canopy. It is believed that some of the ancient pagan tunes were used to sing the psalms.
“Women deacons, an ordained ministry, have served the Armenian Church for centuries. In the Haykazian Dictionary, based on evidence from the 5th-century Armenian translations, the word deaconess is defined as a ‘female worshipper or virgin servant active in the church and superior or head of a nunnery.’ Other pertinent references to women deacons in the Armenian Church are included in the ‘Mashdots Matenadarn collection of manuscripts from the period between the fall of the Cilician kingdom (1375) and the end of the 16th century, which contain the ordination rite for women deacons.’
“The diaconate is one of the major orders in the Armenian Church. The word deacon means to serve ‘with humility’ and to assist. The Armenian deaconesses historically have been called sargavak or deacon. They were also referred to as deaconess sister or deaconess nun. The other major orders of the church are bishop and priest. The deaconesses, like the bishops and monks, are celibate. Their convents are usually described as anabad, meaning, in this case, not a ‘desert’ as the word implies, but rather ‘an isolated location where monastics live away from populated areas.’ Anabads differ from monasteries in their totally secluded life style. In convents and monasteries, Armenian women have served as nuns, scribes, subdeacons, deacons, and archdeacons (‘first among equals’), as a result not only giving of themselves, but enriching and contributing much to our nation and church. In the 17th century, for example, the scribe and deaconess known as Hustianeh had written ‘a devotional collection of prayers and lives of the fathers, and a manuscript titled Book of Hours, dated 1653.’
“The following illustrates the length of time it took a candidate, ‘after years of serious spiritual and religious preparation,’ to become an ordained deaconess: The Deacon Hripsime Sasunian, born in Damascus, Syria, in 1928, entered the Kalfayan Sisterhood Convent in Istanbul, Turkey, at the age of 25. At age 38, she was ordained sub-deacon, and at age 54, deacon.
“To appreciate more fully the role of the deaconess in the church, Father Abel Oghlukian’s book, The Deaconess In The Armenian Church, refers to Fr. Hagop Tashian’s book Vardapetutiun Arakelots… (Teachings of the Apostles…), Vienna, 1896, and Kanonagirk Hayots (Book of Canons) edited by V. Hakobyan, Yerevan, 1964, in which a most striking thought is expressed:
If the bishop represents God the Father and the priest Christ, then the deaconess, by her calling, symbolizes the presence of the Holy Spirit, in consequence of which one should accord her fitting respect.
“The history of the deaconess in the Armenian Apostolic Church can be broken down into two periods: the medieval period beginning in the 9th century, and the modern period beginning in the 17th century to the present, though before the 9th century vague reference is made to them ‘beginning in the 4th century.’ In Prof. Roberta R. Ervine’s published paper titled, ‘The Armenian Church’s Women Deacons,’ which includes a number of fascinating photos of deaconesses, she lists the names of 23 of the Church’s women deacons who have been recorded, along with their ordinations, various activities, and contributions to the church.
“Over the centuries, in some instances, the mission of the Armenian deaconesses was educating, caring for orphans and the elderly, assisting the indigent, comforting the bereaved, and addressing women’s issues. They served in convents and cathedrals, and the general population.
“Though there were those who approved of women in the diaconate, some of the church fathers, such as the clergyman Boghos Taronatsi and Nerses Lambronatsi (1153-1198), whose great uncle was Nerses Shnorhali, did not. Instead, they wanted to close it to them. Interestingly, when Lambronatsi was around ‘37 years old in 1190, his mother Sahandukht and two sisters Susana and Dalita entered the Lambronatsi convent as founding members of that congregation.’
“Mkhitar Gosh (l130-1213), however, who was a priest, public figure, scholar, thinker, and writer, ‘defended the practice of ordaining women to the diaconate,’ Ervine writes, and she adds that in his law book titled, On Clerical Orders and the Royal Family, Gosh described women deacons and their specific usefulness in the following words:
There are also women ordained as deacons, called deaconesses for the sake of preaching to women and reading the Gospel. This makes it unnecessary for a man to enter the convent or for a nun to leave it.
When priests perform baptism on mature women, the deaconesses approach the font to wash the women with the water of atonement behind the curtain.
Their vestments are exactly like those of nuns or sisters, except that on their forehead they have a cross; their stole hangs from over the right shoulder.
Do not consider this new and unprecedented as we learn it from the tradition of the holy apostles: For Paul says, ‘I entrust to you our sister Phoebe, who is a deacon of the church.’
“Smbat Sparabet (Constable), who lived in the 13th century, was the brother of King Hetoum and an important figure in Cilicia. He was a diplomat, judge, military officer, translator (especially of legal codes), and a writer. In his Lawbook he, like Gosh, also mentions women deacons, but ‘places them under the authority of priests, rather than of male deacons.’
“In his book, The History of the Province of Syunik, the historian and bishop of Syunik, Stepanos Orbelian (1260-1304), also wrote about women deacons. He, like Mkhitar Gosh and Smbat Sparabet, also approved of women deacons and believed that it was a laudable institution. In her paper, Ervine explains that Orbelian placed the deaconess in the role of preacher and Gospel reader, and denoted her status of office as a stole (oorar) on the right side. (Later, the women deacons would wear the stole on the left side, like the male deacons.) She includes this passage from Orbelian’s book on Syunik:
The woman deacon served on the altar, as did her male counterpart, and the bishop did not limit her liturgical service to convent churches only, but she did stand apart from the male deacons for avoidance of any perceived impropriety. She also did not touch the sacred Elements.
“In the 17th century, a great reform movement, begun by Movses Tatevatsi, took place in Etchmiadzin. When Tatevatsi became Catholicos in 1629, he ‘sparked a spiritual and cultural revival not only in the Armenian homeland, but also in communities as far away as Jerusalem.’ He was a great believer in the education of women and encouraged them; as a result, the number of women deacons in the church increased.
“Among the progressive and inspiring changes Tatevatsi made, even before his election to Catholicos, was the building of a convent next to St. Hovhannes Church in Nor Julfa (New Julfa) in 1623. The convent complex, which included a church for monastic women, was called Nor Julfaee Soorp Kadareenyan Anabad (St. Catherine’s Convent of New Julfa) after a 4th-century martyr named Saint Catherine.
“Deaconesses Uruksana, Taguhi, and Hripsime were the founding members of St. Catherine’s Convent, which existed for three and one-quarter centuries. St. Catherine’s Convent ran two schools and an orphanage, and oversaw a factory. In its early years, the convent had many Sisters. Throughout the convent’s history, some of the monastic women were ordained as deaconesses, while others ‘were content with receiving minor clerical orders.’
“By 1839, the number of women at the convent had decreased to 16. The last abbess of St. Catherine’s was Yeghsabet Israelian, whose brother was elected Patriarch Giuregh I in Jerusalem in 1944. Eventually, the number of monastic women at the convent decreased even further and in 1954 the doors of St. Catherine’s were closed.
Knarik Meneshian delivering her lecture (Photo by Murad Meneshian)
“Around this period, approximately a thousand miles north of New Julfa, in the city of Shusi in Artsakh, there was a small convent whose members never grew beyond five. In the village of Avedaranots, southeast of Shusi, there was another convent. In the northern part of Artsakh, in the Mardagerd region, there was once a monastery for monastic women in the village of Goosabad known as Goosanats Anabad (Convent of the Virgins). Upon the ruins of the monastery a church was built.
“The women’s monastic community of Koosanats Sourp Stepanos Vank (Convent of St. Stepanos Monestary) was established in Tiflis, Georgia in 1725. The mission at St. Stepanos was the training of women deacons. As at St. Catherine’s, the Sisters at St. Stepanos were ordained deaconesses. ‘In 1933, the community comprised 18 members, 12 of whom were ordained deacons.’
“The abaouhi (abbess) of the convent was always an achdeaconess. She wore a ring on her finger and two crosses that hung down her chest. St. Stepanos’ last abbess, Deaconess Hripsime Tahiriants, who was a woman of authority and influence, came from a prominent family. During a trip to Jerusalem, she served on the altar of the Cathedral of Saints James in Jerusalem. The deaconesses of St. Stepanos were noted for their musical abilities, and as a result, they were frequently asked to perform at functions, including funerals. These engagements helped support their religious community. When women entered convents, they brought funds with them to help support themselves. If, however, someone came from an indigent family, then the abbess provided for her needs. Upon the death of a deaconess, whatever money remained after funeral expenses was kept by the convent. If, however, upon the monastic woman’s death, she had not yet attained the rank of deaconess, after funeral expenses, half of the money she brought with her to the convent was returned to the family.
“It is interesting to note that Holy Etchmiadzin’s finely carved wooden doors are a gift from Deaconess Tahiriants. The inscription on the doors read: Heeshadak Avak- Sarkavakoohi Hripsime Aghek Tahiriants, 1889 (In Memory of Archdeaconess Hripsime Aghek Tahiriants).
“In 1892, Deaconess Tahiriants traveled to Etchmiadzin for the consecration of Khrimian Hayrig as Catholicos, and there she presented him with a gold and silver embroidered likeness of the Cathedral of Etchmiadzin. It was on this occasion that she had given H.F.B. Lynch, the author of Armenia: Travels and Studies, her photo, which the author used in his book, and is on the cover of Fr. Oghlukian’s book and in Ervine’s paper.
St. Stepanos’s women’s community ceased to exist before 1939, but Nicolas Zernov, a Russian clergyman and writer on church affairs, wrote in 1939 how impressed he had been when present at the Eucharist in the St. Stepanos Armenian Church in Tiflis ‘where a woman deacon fully vested brought forward the chalice for the communion of the people.’
“According to internet sources, in 1988, the Georgian government took ownership of the 14th-century church. Between 1990 and 1991, all Armenian inscriptions were either removed or destroyed, and burial vaults where the Armenian deaconesses were laid to rest were destroyed. Goosanats Sourp Stepanos Vank is now a Georgian church.
“The Kalfayan Sisterhood of Istanbul, whose ‘stated mission was the care and education of orphans,’ was established in 1866. Patriarch Mesrop Naroyan ordained the sisterhood’s first member, Aghavni Keoseian, as deacon in 1932. Patriarch Shnork Galustian ordained the last, Hripsime Sasunian, in 1982.
“Ervine writes of Sasunian: ‘In 1986, Deacon Hripsime Sasunian visited the Western Diocese of America, where she served the liturgy in a different parish of the Diocese on each Sunday of her visit. She had functioned as head of the Kalfayan Orphanage, served the Patriarchate as an accountant, in addition to serving the Sunday liturgy in various parishes in the capital. Patriarch Galustian used, on the occasion of the ordination of Deacon Hripsime Sasunian, the canon for a male deacon.’
“Deaconess Sasunian was invited to Lebanon in 1990 by His Holiness Catholicos Karekin I to found a new Sisterhood. Named the Sisterhood of the Followers of St. Gayane, it was established next to the Bird’s Nest Orphanage in Byblos, Lebanon. As a result, the monastic veil was awarded to the Sisterhood’s first candidate, Knarik Gaypakyan, in the Cathedral at Antelias on June 2, 1991. ‘At the present time, three women deacons serve the Bird’s Nest Orphanage…under the jurisdiction of the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia.’ (Note: In a press release from the Armenian Prelacy of Aderbadagan, Iran, it was announced that on Mon., June 24, 2013, the Very Reverend Der Grigor Chiftjian, Prelate of Aderbadagan, attended a meeting regarding church matters at the Catholicosate in Antelias. He also visited the Bird’s Nest Orphanage and met with Sisters Knarik Gaypakian, Shnorhig Boyadjian, and Gayane Badakian to discuss how to attract more women to the Sisterhood.)
“Besides the places mentioned, women’s religious communities also existed in Astrakhan, Russia, Bursa, Turkey, and Jazlowiec, Poland. In Astrakhan, two deaconesses, sisters Hrpsime and Anna Mnatsaganyan, served the community. They each gifted a diaconal stole to the Cathedral of Etchmiadzin, with the inscriptions ‘Deaconess nun at the Cathedral of Soorp Asdvatsadzeen, Astrakhan, 1837,’ followed by their names. In the 1800’s, in Turkey’s Bursa region, Deaconess Nazeni Geoziumian ran a school for girls, along with her religious duties. In Jazlowiec (pronounced Yaswovietch), Hripsime Spendowski was ordained deaconess. She was the daughter of Stepan Spendowski, an Armenian who had immigrated to Jazlowiec in 1648. The town had a sizeable Armenian population, and the Armenian Prelacy was established there in 1250. Because of Spendowski’s heroism and distinguished military service fighting the Tatars and Turks, who had invaded the town, the King of Poland honored him with the rank of nobility, and bestowed upon him the title of ‘mayor for life’ of Jazlowiez.
“In 1984, Archbishop Vatche Hovsepian, Primate of the Western Diocese, ordained Seta Simonian Atamian acolyte at the holy altar of St. Andrew Armenian Church, in Cupertino, Calif. In 2002, Archbishop Gisak Mouradian, Primate of Argentina, ordained Maria Ozkul to the diaconate.
“Currently, there is a small number of nuns serving the Armenian Apostolic Church in Armenia. Established in the early part of the 21st century, their order is known as the Sourp Hripsimyants Order. They reside in the vanadoon (monastery) at Sourp Hripsime Church in Etchmiadzin, one of the ‘oldest historical monuments of Armenian architecture and the second church built by St. Gregory the Illuminator during the first quarter of the 4th century, and rebuilt in 618.’
I conclude my presentation with a quote by Bishop Karekin Servantzdiantz who was a student of Khrimian Hayrig, a patriot, preacher, writer, and compiler of Armenian stories—fables, anecdotes, and folk-tales:
Patriotism is a measureless and sublime virtue, and the real root of genuine goodness. It is a kind of virtue that prepares a man to become the most eager defender of the land, water, and traditions of the fatherland.
“The women deacons of the Armenian Apostolic Church, who through the centuries have reverently and humbly served our church and nation, are shining examples of the most eager defenders of the land, water, and traditions of the Fatherland.”
(Retrieved from: http://armenianweekly.com/2013/07/06/a-nearly-forgotten-history-women-deacons-in-the-armenian-church/).
Sources
Ervine, Roberta R. “The Armenian Church’s Women Deacons.” St. Nerses Theological Review (New Rochelle) 12 (2007).
Oghlukian, Fr. Abel. The Deaconess In The Armenian Church – A Brief Survey. New Rochelle, NY: St. Nerses Armenian Seminary, 1994.
Barnett, James Monroe. The Diaconate – A Full And Equal Order. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995.
Karapetyan, Bakour. Haryour Darvah Yerkkhosootyun (A Hundred Year’s Dialogue). Yerevan, Armenia, 1990.
Lynch, H.F.B. Armenia – Travels and Studies,V 1. New York: The Armenian Prelacy, 1990.
Gulbekian, Yedvard. “Women In The Armenian Church.” Hye Sharzhoom (Fresno, CA) (April 1982).
Meneshian, Knarik O. “The Sisters At The Church of St. Hripsime.” The Armenian Weekly (July 10, 2004).
Eastern Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America. “Year Of The Armenian Woman 2010, Pontifical Message of His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos Of The Great House of Cilicia.” New York, 2009.
Karras, Valerie. “Women In The Eastern Church – Past, Present, and Future.” The St. Nina Quarterly, A Journal Exploring the Ministry of Women in the Eastern Orthodox Church, vol.1, no. 1, (Cambridge, MA), 1997.
Der-Ghazarian, Sub-Dn. Lazarus. “On The Order of Deaconesses In The Armenian and Catholic Church – A Concise Overview.” Online article, Dec. 25, 2008.
Synek, Eva M. “Christian Priesthood East and West: Towards A Convergence?” MaryMartha Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1996. (Note: The report, which discusses the deaconesses of the Armenian Apostolic Church, was presented at the XII International Congress of the Society for the Law of the Eastern Churches, Brookline, Boston, MA, 1995. [Report is Online])
Boyajian, Dikran H., ed. & comp. The Pillars Of The Armenian Church, Watertown, MA: Baikar Press, 1962.
Jesus Christ -The Tree of Life
Celtic Theology 4: The Problem of Pelagius
By Lauren Salerno
Watch the 2004 film King Arthur and you would believe all Romano-British Christians were Pelagian. In fact we don’t know how widespread his ideas were in Britain. What we do know is that he is a fixed point in our Christian history because despite writing in Rome and dying in Palestine he was a British bishop and no doubt influenced the British / Celtic church possibly for centuries
Born in the mid 4th Century , the age of councils, where doctrines were hammered out and orthodoxy established, Pelagius took a position that was largely condemned as heretical in the West though less so in the East and which has, perhaps in diluted forms continued to today. John Cassian the “father of Western monasticism” was often accused of taking a “semi-Pelagian stance”.
In order to understand what he taught we have to look at what we believe today. Modern Christian belief in the fall of Adam, of original sin being inherent in humanity because of Adam’s disobedience and of the need for a sinless man (Christ) to undo what Adam did (substitionary atonement) is actually a 4th/5th Century doctrine ascribed to Augustine. Like many doctrines it may have been around before him but he certainly clarified and codified this position.
Pelagius however viewed the scriptures, especially Paul, differently. He could not see how a God of love would allow humanity to be punished or burdened by Adam’s error. For Pelagius what Adam passed on was not sin but the human capacity for choice (which could be to sin or not); sin, therefore, was not predestined but an act of free will, meaning we could also freely choose to accept the grace of God offered through the Cross. The cross did not save us from sin as such but provided a means of grace to strengthen and guide our free will to follow the Divine within us. The cross awakened the Divine, offered us the choice and we through the grace offered can accept or reject.
The church councils were very much divided on this approach and his views were both condemned and accepted, although it was only on the basis of the later works of Augustine that Pelagius was condemned as heretical. However, Cassian and others seemed to take a middle road. Yes we carry original sin as descendants of Adam and we needed more than our divine awakened to be saved as Augustine argued but we are free to choose, God does not decide who receives his grace and who is therefore saved.
The debate continues to inspire polarities of opinion even today, for example in the Calvinistic “once saved always saved” and “predetermination” beliefs, and also in the differences between Eastern Orthodox and Catholic theology. Whilst we can be certain that the “Celtic church” were aware of such debates (and others), there are sufficient hints that Cassian’s middle road may have been the norm in Celtic theology as Palladius was sent to root it out in Ireland and David was thought to be anti-Pelagian. (Source: http://llan-community.org.uk/446/).
By Lauren Salerno
Watch the 2004 film King Arthur and you would believe all Romano-British Christians were Pelagian. In fact we don’t know how widespread his ideas were in Britain. What we do know is that he is a fixed point in our Christian history because despite writing in Rome and dying in Palestine he was a British bishop and no doubt influenced the British / Celtic church possibly for centuries
Born in the mid 4th Century , the age of councils, where doctrines were hammered out and orthodoxy established, Pelagius took a position that was largely condemned as heretical in the West though less so in the East and which has, perhaps in diluted forms continued to today. John Cassian the “father of Western monasticism” was often accused of taking a “semi-Pelagian stance”.
In order to understand what he taught we have to look at what we believe today. Modern Christian belief in the fall of Adam, of original sin being inherent in humanity because of Adam’s disobedience and of the need for a sinless man (Christ) to undo what Adam did (substitionary atonement) is actually a 4th/5th Century doctrine ascribed to Augustine. Like many doctrines it may have been around before him but he certainly clarified and codified this position.
Pelagius however viewed the scriptures, especially Paul, differently. He could not see how a God of love would allow humanity to be punished or burdened by Adam’s error. For Pelagius what Adam passed on was not sin but the human capacity for choice (which could be to sin or not); sin, therefore, was not predestined but an act of free will, meaning we could also freely choose to accept the grace of God offered through the Cross. The cross did not save us from sin as such but provided a means of grace to strengthen and guide our free will to follow the Divine within us. The cross awakened the Divine, offered us the choice and we through the grace offered can accept or reject.
The church councils were very much divided on this approach and his views were both condemned and accepted, although it was only on the basis of the later works of Augustine that Pelagius was condemned as heretical. However, Cassian and others seemed to take a middle road. Yes we carry original sin as descendants of Adam and we needed more than our divine awakened to be saved as Augustine argued but we are free to choose, God does not decide who receives his grace and who is therefore saved.
The debate continues to inspire polarities of opinion even today, for example in the Calvinistic “once saved always saved” and “predetermination” beliefs, and also in the differences between Eastern Orthodox and Catholic theology. Whilst we can be certain that the “Celtic church” were aware of such debates (and others), there are sufficient hints that Cassian’s middle road may have been the norm in Celtic theology as Palladius was sent to root it out in Ireland and David was thought to be anti-Pelagian. (Source: http://llan-community.org.uk/446/).
Healing the Wounds of Calcedon
by Bavly Kost
Editor’s Note: We called out to some people on the Internet to see if we could get the history of the Chalcedonian controversy as told by those on the other side – the Oriental Orthodox. The Oriental Orthodox separated from the rest of the Church in the 5th century and to this day it’s a matter of debate as to why. Bavly Kost, a Coptic Christian, lays out the history of the issue, what misunderstandings may have cause the schism and what both sides are doing to heal today.
The Council of Chalcedon met in 451 A.D in Asia Minor and the council’s ruling was an important step in further clarifying the person of Christ. However, in order to understand and appreciate the events of Chalcedon, a quick review of the century prior to the council is needed.
Background
The first council, which met at Nicaea in 325 A.D, was convened for many reasons (dating of Easter etc), one being the attempt to resolve the dispute between Arius and Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria. Arius taught that- “There was a time when the son of God was not”, which is to say that the Son of God has a beginning like all human beings. This idea was defeated by Alexander and his Deacon at the time, Athanasius. The Council proclaimed that Jesus is Truly God, and Athanasius– for the next half century– wrote and defended this teaching. In 381 A.D, another council took place in Constantinople, which had become the new capital of the Roman Empire. This council addressed Apollinaris’ claim that, “Jesus’ divine nature had displaced His human mind and will”. According to Apollinaris, Jesus is not fully human. Following this we had Nestorius separate the nature and wills, essentially making Jesus two persons sharing one body. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria at the time, coined the term, “One Nature of the Incarnate Logos (God) (Greek=Mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkomene)” to combat the Nestorian teaching. Following Nestorius, Eutyches, a monk from Constantinople, also denied that Jesus is truly human, saying, “Jesus’ human nature was absorbed by His divine nature”. Through his teachings, Eutyches thought he was upholding the teachings of Cyril and those who came before him. This leads to the council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D and, inevitably, the breakup of the Church.
Dioscorus, Bishop of Alexandria, in 449 A.D, had acquitted Eutyches of any wrong teaching at a gathering that took place in Ephesus, which would forever be infamously referred as the “Robber Council”. The emperor Theodosius the 2nd called for the council and Dioscorus was made to preside over the council. With the political tide changing and a new emperor enthroned, Marcian called for another council in 451. The Council of Chalcedon began with reading the minutes of Ephesus II. Dioscorus appeared in the first few sessions of the council. Dioscorus said that if Eutyches says and believes what is against the Church, only then does he deserve condemnation. Dioscorus made an appeal to the writings of Cyril, his teacher, as holding the truth about the person of Christ.
The Root of the Issue
Many historians claim that the Alexandrian bishops thought that Chalcedon was parting from the teachings of Cyril and made an appeal to the Nestorian teachings.
Many historians claim that the Alexandrian bishops thought that Chalcedon was parting from the teachings of Cyril and made an appeal to the Nestorian teachings. The language used sounded like a breakup of the natures in Christ. The famous Cyrillian formula was never used in the council and this angered many of the Alexandrian bishops. The Cyrillian formula, quoted above, was already accepted by all the churches in the East and West. The belief that Jesus had one nature out of two was declared orthodox in the council of Ephesus. Only in thought can we speak of two natures in Christ. This Cyrillian understanding was not used in the final drafting of Chalcedon and this angered many of the Alexandrian Bishops. The council, unfortunately, was tied to a lot of politics that had developed through the last century. Alexandria had lost its weight to the new Roman capital Constantinople and was playing third fiddle on the hierarchy list. The Alexandrian’s wanted to assert their role in the empire, and many forces wanted to send a clear message to them.
The final outcome of the council was the exile and excommunication of Dioscorus, not on account of doctrine, but rather for administrative reasons. The council went on to declare that Christ is in two natures; He is Truly God and Truly Man, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably, and inconfusedly, The divine and human natures of Christ are distinct yet united in one person. This co-existence of Christ’s two natures is called the hypostatic union based on the Cyrillene formula. The hypostatic union is maintained by the Alexandrian bishops who thought the council of Chalcedon moved away from this understanding.
The Situation Now
For anyone who comes from the Oriental family of churches this issue has become insignificant.
As a Coptic Theologian living in the 21st century, and for anyone who comes from the Oriental family of churches this issue has become insignificant. Both churches have met countless times in the last 50 years, and have declared that the events that took place in Chalcedon should not be used today as a way to ostracize each other’s churches. With the advancement of technology, we can clearly see that misunderstandings and political tides were major factors in the decisions that took place in Chalcedon. The final agreed upon statements between both churches (1993) have pushed for the following:
In the light of our agreed statements on Christology as well as of the above common affirmation, we have now clearly understood that both families have always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological Faith, and the unbroken continuity of the Apostolic tradition, though they may have used Christological terms in different ways. It is this common faith and continuous loyalty to the Apostolic Tradition that should be the basis of our unity and communion.
Both families agree that all the anathemas and condemnations of the past which now divide us should be lifted by the Churches in order that the last obstacle to the full unity and communion can be removed by the grace and power of God. Both families agree that the lifting of anathemas and condemnations will be consummated on the basis that the councils and Fathers previously anathemized or condemned are not heretical. (Bold is my emphasis)
Theologians from both sides have come together and agreed on the idea that we hold the same language and understanding on the nature of Christ.
Theologians from both sides have come together and agreed on the idea that we hold the same language and understanding on the nature of Christ. His Grace Paulus Mar Gregorios, Fr. John Romanindes, Father V.C. Samuels, Fr. John Meyendorff and countless others have signed these agreed statements and have concluded that the divisions and barriers that have kept us separate for 1500 years need to be removed. Fr. Georges Florovsky spoke about VC Samuels saying his theology is Orthodox and true to the Apostolic Church. Many on the ground level are already doing this with many priests marrying and communing each other without requiring them to be “re-baptized” or chrismated, with the permission of the local bishop. However, on the synodal level, the final step towards full union remains, which is the lifting of the anathemas by the bishops of the respective churches. With this hope, we pray that the church may be united, and using the words of Christ as a reminder, we recalled the Gospel of John, hapter 17 v.21, “That they all may be one, as you, Father, are in Me, and I in you; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.” (Source: http://www.theologues.com/the-church/healing-the-wounds-of-chalcedon/?utm_content=buffer28b79&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer)
by Bavly Kost
Editor’s Note: We called out to some people on the Internet to see if we could get the history of the Chalcedonian controversy as told by those on the other side – the Oriental Orthodox. The Oriental Orthodox separated from the rest of the Church in the 5th century and to this day it’s a matter of debate as to why. Bavly Kost, a Coptic Christian, lays out the history of the issue, what misunderstandings may have cause the schism and what both sides are doing to heal today.
The Council of Chalcedon met in 451 A.D in Asia Minor and the council’s ruling was an important step in further clarifying the person of Christ. However, in order to understand and appreciate the events of Chalcedon, a quick review of the century prior to the council is needed.
Background
The first council, which met at Nicaea in 325 A.D, was convened for many reasons (dating of Easter etc), one being the attempt to resolve the dispute between Arius and Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria. Arius taught that- “There was a time when the son of God was not”, which is to say that the Son of God has a beginning like all human beings. This idea was defeated by Alexander and his Deacon at the time, Athanasius. The Council proclaimed that Jesus is Truly God, and Athanasius– for the next half century– wrote and defended this teaching. In 381 A.D, another council took place in Constantinople, which had become the new capital of the Roman Empire. This council addressed Apollinaris’ claim that, “Jesus’ divine nature had displaced His human mind and will”. According to Apollinaris, Jesus is not fully human. Following this we had Nestorius separate the nature and wills, essentially making Jesus two persons sharing one body. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria at the time, coined the term, “One Nature of the Incarnate Logos (God) (Greek=Mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkomene)” to combat the Nestorian teaching. Following Nestorius, Eutyches, a monk from Constantinople, also denied that Jesus is truly human, saying, “Jesus’ human nature was absorbed by His divine nature”. Through his teachings, Eutyches thought he was upholding the teachings of Cyril and those who came before him. This leads to the council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D and, inevitably, the breakup of the Church.
Dioscorus, Bishop of Alexandria, in 449 A.D, had acquitted Eutyches of any wrong teaching at a gathering that took place in Ephesus, which would forever be infamously referred as the “Robber Council”. The emperor Theodosius the 2nd called for the council and Dioscorus was made to preside over the council. With the political tide changing and a new emperor enthroned, Marcian called for another council in 451. The Council of Chalcedon began with reading the minutes of Ephesus II. Dioscorus appeared in the first few sessions of the council. Dioscorus said that if Eutyches says and believes what is against the Church, only then does he deserve condemnation. Dioscorus made an appeal to the writings of Cyril, his teacher, as holding the truth about the person of Christ.
The Root of the Issue
Many historians claim that the Alexandrian bishops thought that Chalcedon was parting from the teachings of Cyril and made an appeal to the Nestorian teachings.
Many historians claim that the Alexandrian bishops thought that Chalcedon was parting from the teachings of Cyril and made an appeal to the Nestorian teachings. The language used sounded like a breakup of the natures in Christ. The famous Cyrillian formula was never used in the council and this angered many of the Alexandrian bishops. The Cyrillian formula, quoted above, was already accepted by all the churches in the East and West. The belief that Jesus had one nature out of two was declared orthodox in the council of Ephesus. Only in thought can we speak of two natures in Christ. This Cyrillian understanding was not used in the final drafting of Chalcedon and this angered many of the Alexandrian Bishops. The council, unfortunately, was tied to a lot of politics that had developed through the last century. Alexandria had lost its weight to the new Roman capital Constantinople and was playing third fiddle on the hierarchy list. The Alexandrian’s wanted to assert their role in the empire, and many forces wanted to send a clear message to them.
The final outcome of the council was the exile and excommunication of Dioscorus, not on account of doctrine, but rather for administrative reasons. The council went on to declare that Christ is in two natures; He is Truly God and Truly Man, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably, and inconfusedly, The divine and human natures of Christ are distinct yet united in one person. This co-existence of Christ’s two natures is called the hypostatic union based on the Cyrillene formula. The hypostatic union is maintained by the Alexandrian bishops who thought the council of Chalcedon moved away from this understanding.
The Situation Now
For anyone who comes from the Oriental family of churches this issue has become insignificant.
As a Coptic Theologian living in the 21st century, and for anyone who comes from the Oriental family of churches this issue has become insignificant. Both churches have met countless times in the last 50 years, and have declared that the events that took place in Chalcedon should not be used today as a way to ostracize each other’s churches. With the advancement of technology, we can clearly see that misunderstandings and political tides were major factors in the decisions that took place in Chalcedon. The final agreed upon statements between both churches (1993) have pushed for the following:
In the light of our agreed statements on Christology as well as of the above common affirmation, we have now clearly understood that both families have always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological Faith, and the unbroken continuity of the Apostolic tradition, though they may have used Christological terms in different ways. It is this common faith and continuous loyalty to the Apostolic Tradition that should be the basis of our unity and communion.
Both families agree that all the anathemas and condemnations of the past which now divide us should be lifted by the Churches in order that the last obstacle to the full unity and communion can be removed by the grace and power of God. Both families agree that the lifting of anathemas and condemnations will be consummated on the basis that the councils and Fathers previously anathemized or condemned are not heretical. (Bold is my emphasis)
Theologians from both sides have come together and agreed on the idea that we hold the same language and understanding on the nature of Christ.
Theologians from both sides have come together and agreed on the idea that we hold the same language and understanding on the nature of Christ. His Grace Paulus Mar Gregorios, Fr. John Romanindes, Father V.C. Samuels, Fr. John Meyendorff and countless others have signed these agreed statements and have concluded that the divisions and barriers that have kept us separate for 1500 years need to be removed. Fr. Georges Florovsky spoke about VC Samuels saying his theology is Orthodox and true to the Apostolic Church. Many on the ground level are already doing this with many priests marrying and communing each other without requiring them to be “re-baptized” or chrismated, with the permission of the local bishop. However, on the synodal level, the final step towards full union remains, which is the lifting of the anathemas by the bishops of the respective churches. With this hope, we pray that the church may be united, and using the words of Christ as a reminder, we recalled the Gospel of John, hapter 17 v.21, “That they all may be one, as you, Father, are in Me, and I in you; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.” (Source: http://www.theologues.com/the-church/healing-the-wounds-of-chalcedon/?utm_content=buffer28b79&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer)