Roads from Emmaus is the personal weblog of the Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, pastor of St. Paul Orthodox Christian Church of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, author of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Exploring Belief Systems Through the Lens of the Ancient Christian Faith (available from Conciliar Press and via Amazon.com) and host of the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy and Roads from Emmaus podcasts.
“Giving Up Something” for Lent
Could you give up Rickrolling for Lent?
Mark Galli recently posted an article entitled Giving Up Self-Discipline for Lent which is actually a fairly fascinating look into what Lenten ascetical effort looks like from within a Pietist tradition. Pietism is, in brief, the belief that the private relationship with God is paramount and that doctrine and shared tradition in community are relatively unimportant. (For more on this, see Pietism as an ecclesiological heresy by Christos Yannaras.)
That such a piece would be posted on the Christianity Today site is certainly a sign of the times. Lent itself has been religio non grata for Evangelicals’ low-church Protestantism descended from the Radical Reformation for quite a long time. I’ve been surprised in recent years to hear of Evangelicals recovering the idea of Lent, and here we have an example of someone from that tradition reflecting critically on that appropriation.
Or do we? CT is certainly an Evangelical publication, but who is Mark Galli, and why does he construct his argument in the way he does? We’ll get to that, but let’s first look at the argument itself and how I as an Orthodox Christian would evaluate it.
The narrative here has a classic rhetorical shape: Appear to be criticizing or dismissing something, then reveal how you’re not really criticizing it, but instead revealing its true message contra the popular impression of that thing. Thus, Galli seems to be dismissing Lent (“the Grinch that stole Lent”) initially, but he eventually says that its true value is something else.
How does this actually work out in the article? What he is indeed criticizing is that Lent really is about self-discipline. Self-discipline as an inherent good is part of the Pietist package, and it makes sense to approach Lent from that angle (if one approaches it at all) from within Evangelicalism. Modern Evangelicalism is so steeped in the culture of self-improvement and self-help (not to mention, self-service) that Lent actually starts looking pretty good, so long as it’s understood in this Pietist manner.
And why shouldn’t it be understood this way? Evangelicals’ main cultural contact for Lent is American Roman Catholics, whose Lenten asceticism no longer even necessarily includes actual fasting on Fridays—to say nothing of every day during the season, which is Roman Catholics’ ancient tradition, giving up even dairy, which is why there are Shrove Tuesday pancakes and (around these parts), Fastnacht Day. Rather, what they see is “giving something up for Lent.” Picking something to give up for Lent is a perfectly Pietistic thing to do. (Pietism has, alas, affected not only the churches of the Reformation.)
Because there is no doctrine of theosis (divinization/deification, the process of becoming united with God in His divine energies) in the world of Pietism—nor really in any of the Reformation churches—asceticism has nothing to do with uniting with God. For us who believe in theosis, asceticism’s very purpose is the retraining of the will, not for the sake of mere self-discipline, but rather because the will has to become receptive to divine grace in order to receive it. But that doesn’t exist outside of theosis, so fasting or giving up anything at all for Lent will not, as Galli says, actually lead to more self-discipline. That wasn’t its purpose when it was commanded by Christ, so attempting to use it for that won’t actually accomplish it. Asceticism’s purpose is the retraining of the will, not the self-improvement of the body. Fasting is not a diet to help us lose weight or to become more “responsible.” It is the ongoing struggle against the passions.
What’s also missing from Pietistic asceticism is the guidance of tradition and community. Remember that Pietism’s concern is the private relationship with God, so there is little room for the idea that one should have a father-confessor guiding one’s asceticism, who is himself guided by centuries of Church tradition and experience. It’s something you do on your own and for yourself. So why shouldn’t you just pick and choose for yourself how you’re going to do it?
Galli essentially shares some of these same criticisms that Orthodoxy has of this Pietistic approach to Lent, though certainly he doesn’t make his criticisms from within Orthodox tradition, so there is no theosis here to reveal asceticism’s traditional Christian purpose. He also does not seem to have any problem with the individualized approach to Lent, so he’s keeping at least that bit of Pietism intact. This leads us to ask just how it is he has determined what he calls “the real point of Lent”:
Here’s the one invaluable thing that Lent teaches: Yes, Martha, you are the undisciplined, self-centered human being you suspected you were. Yes, Frank, you are in many respects a miserable excuse for a human being. Yes, we are sinners, and sinners without hope. When it comes to the really important things—like learning to have faith, hope, and love—we can’t do a blessed thing to improve ourselves. These come as gifts or they don’t come at all.
To me, participating in a Lenten discipline is my chance to do a little play acting. What would it be like to live as if the law were in fact sufficient? How about for 40 days I pretend that I really can improve myself in the sight of God? Let’s see how that works for me.
What I find Lent after Lent after Lent is that Lent is a miserable way to live! This is one reason we’re so glad when Lent is over! If Lent were such a great idea, if it really did make us better Christians, you’d think we’d want to turn Lent into a lifestyle. But no, we don’t want to do that precisely because Lent is an onerous form of existence. It’s the life of duty. Life under law. Life as a death march.
So here we have to figure out exactly from where within the Reformation Galli is making his criticisms of the Pietistic approach to Lent. To figure that out, I had to do a little digging.
Galli is of course one of the editors at CT, but some Googling reveals that he is also a member of the Church of the Resurrection in the Wheaton, Illinois, area. And to whom do they belong? That also took some digging. (What is it with churches that don’t tell you up front which denomination they’re part of?) They belong to the Anglican Mission in America, a conservative breakaway from the Episcopal Church USA (which has as a body gone quite off the deep end in recent decades). So Galli is coming from that interesting, multifarious and confusing world of Anglican traditions (note well the plural).
But he is essentially using a Lutheran argument, which is not surprising coming from a conservative Anglican. They’ve always had a certain affection for Lutheranism. Martin Luther, as you remember, identified good works as being opposed to faith—which was not St. Paul’s argument at all; Paul was instead concerned to contrast grace with the works of the Law of Moses, not with good works in general (Luther’s error was to conflate “the [Mosaic] law” with “good works”). (For more on this, see the rather bountiful references to the inherent close connection between faith and good works in the entire Epistle of James, which Luther was none too fond of.)
So the best that good works can offer—and of course asceticism was very much on Luther’s mind as a “good work,” seeing he was an Augustinian monk—is the same that the Mosaic Law can offer. It is a tutor to show you what a rotten sinner you are. That’s what Paul says about the Mosaic Law, but he doesn’t say it about asceticism. (Instead, the whole New Testament actually speaks quite highly of asceticism and its place in making the will receptive to grace. But never mind that.)
So what we really have here in Galli’s article is essentially a less Pietistic sector of the Reformation criticizing a more Pietistic one.
For Orthodox Christians, Lent and all of our ascetical effort (which includes fasting around half the days of the year, not just Lent, as well as other ascetical practices, none of which include picking something to give up) are about neither the Pietistic emphasis on self-discipline and individual piety and belief nor in the more Lutheran concern of revealing us to be sinners (thus representing the continuum between the Radical and Magisterial Reformations, respectively). There is nothing wrong with either goal, of course, but that is not the point of asceticism.
And I have to say that asceticism is rather a silly method of showing yourself to be a sinner. Wouldn’t it be easier just to take a long, hard look at yourself? And what about the Pharisees who “succeed” in their asceticism? It would seem to have the opposite effect on them. Centuries upon centuries of Christian tradition is finally about “play acting”? Yeah, that does sound pretty “miserable” and “onerous” to me, but that’s because you’re doing it wrong.
It actually doesn’t particularly matter if we succeed in “self-improvement” by means of asceticism. If we do, great, but if not, what we are actually trying to achieve is something different. It is becoming more receptive to the free gift of divine grace, so that we can become by grace what Christ is by nature, so that we can be united to God in His energies, becoming partakers of the divine nature.
It also doesn’t matter if we reveal ourselves to be sinners or not in practicing asceticism. To be honest, if you’re not aware that you’re a sinner simply by being in the presence of the beauty and glory of Orthodox Christian worship, then I’m not sure what will reveal it to you. But I suppose if you belong to a religion that does not know about that beauty, it may well take something else to reveal this to you, because you’re cut off from the true revelation of that glory.
Because he is probably far from experiencing the amazingly heartrending beauty that we Orthodox experience in Lent, I can see why someone like Galli might find Lent to be “a miserable way to live” and why he’d never want to “turn Lent into a lifestyle.” But if you’re Orthodox, Lent is very much “a lifestyle”! We’re always in the process of struggling against the passions of our will, and asceticism is our constant companion—Lent is only one season in which it is intensified. And if we do it the right way—as part of the Orthodox Christian community—it is rather far from being a miserable life. Indeed, the true ascetics always have a curiously indomitable joy.
For the Orthodox, Great Lent’s purpose is possible and revealed only within the actual community of faith, both within space (including all those currently in the Church) and time (including all those who have come before). It is not an individual achievement. It is something that is done within the Eucharistic, liturgical community, which is why Great Lent so radically transforms our daily liturgical life. It is also perhaps why so many people who may not otherwise make confession a frequent practice often find it within themselves to come to confession during the Lenten springtime (and “spring” is what Lent actually means, by the way)—they feel something awakening, and they know that the only possibility for its coming to full alertness is to reconcile and renew with the community with the guidance of their father-confessor.
What is missing both from the Pietism that Galli criticizes and the Reformation opposition between faith and works that he endorses is the doctrine of theosis, which is communion with the Holy Trinity. That communion between us men and women and the Divine Community Himself (for He is three Persons!) is what drives our asceticism and is the inner meaning of Great Lent.
For a great deal more on what asceticism actually means and how it’s everywhere in the New Testament, contra what the Reformation says about such things, I very much recommend a piece by Fr. Georges Florovsky to which I linked above, The Ascetic Ideal and the New Testament: Reflections on the Critique of the Theology of the Reformation. In English, at least, you can hardly do any better.
The Transfiguration of Place: An Orthodox Christian Vision of Localism
The Breaking of Bread at Emmaus
Both parts of my talk, The Transfiguration of Place: An Orthodox Christian Vision of Localism, are now available via Ancient Faith Radio. Get them here: Part 1, Part 2
I have to say that this is one of my favorites among the things I’ve written. A number of folks have actually asked me to expand this into a book, but I don’t think I really yet have the experience or background to have enough material to warrant a book on this. Perhaps I will someday.
Interview with Theron Mathis on “Sword in the Fire”
Theron Mathis, author of The Rest of the Bible: A Guide to the Old Testament of the Early Church, has graciously conducted a brief interview with me regarding Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy and other matters on his weblog Sword in the Fire.
Excerpt from the introduction:
Fr. Andrew does the seemingly impossible in a mere 224 pages. He gives a broad scope of Orthodox belief, but details every imaginable brand of Christianity, cult, and world religion.
The book originally began as a podcast series on Ancient Faith radio with the same name, but don’t be afraid of redundant content, there is plenty of new information expressed clearly for the religion teacher and the non-specialist.
The Eminem Ethic
I spotted this image on Facebook today, and it puts forth a commonly accepted ethic, which I’ve dubbed here the Eminem Ethic. Essentially, various categories of race, sexual desire, physical appearance, and economic status don’t matter when it comes to winning his kindness. What matters is that “you’re nice to me.”
This sounds pretty good. This is a morality bandwagon that probably most folks in American culture could jump on. It probably even sounds noble. And of course this is a familiar ethic. In 1991, Michael Jackson told us that it didn’t matter if we were black or white. He would probably add Eminem’s various categories, too, if he were writing his song now.
Probably the most obvious point here is that these various categories of human being and behavior don’t matter much when it comes to kindness toward others. With that, I agree. I laud Eminem’s desire to be kind to people without regard to these categories.
But let’s think about this for a moment. It is probably one of mankind’s most basic yearnings that we overcome divisions between each other. Even the most rabid Nazi, despite his desire to expel all difference from Germany, actually desired peace and not divisiveness—his method for attaining it was of course, monstrous. The Eminem Ethic is similarly problematic, because it also expels difference from his sense of community, but in this case, it is a difference based on one behavior—being nice.
Implicit in this ethic is its inverse: If you are not nice to me, I will not be nice to you. This is the ethic of revenge. There is nothing in the Eminem Ethic that will prevent or end wars, that will overcome differences, that will bring about peace, because he leaves us the excuse for not being nice to those who are not nice to us.
And we are also left with this ethical problem: If being nice depends on the nice behavior of others, then who actually gets the ball rolling? Someone will first have to be nice to someone who has not yet been nice to them. But if everyone follows the Eminem Ethic, then there will never be any niceness at all, because we’d all be waiting for other people to be nice first before we return the favor.
Let’s compare this ethic with the ethic that is, quite frankly, superior to all others:
But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive back, what credit is that to you? For even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much back. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is kind to the unthankful and evil. Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful. (Luke 6:32-26)
When at the birth of Jesus the angels announced to the shepherds that there would be “peace on Earth,” this is what they surely had in mind. Jesus was born into a world dominated by the pagan ethic of obligation and revenge—which is what the Eminem Ethic actually is. But He came to bring something higher, something far better, and that is the ethic of love.
True love is not obligation or reciprocity. It is not what you owe someone else, and it is not in return for something you have received. In sending His Son Jesus, the Father gets the ball rolling, but it is not the ball of niceness, but of love. And what is love? It is to care for and give to another in a self-sacrificial way. Jesus puts it exceptionally clearly in the quote above, and He even tells us to love not just those who have failed to be nice to us, but even those who hate us and oppose us, the unthankful and the evil.
In the passage immediately preceding the one quoted above, Jesus says this:
But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you. To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also. And from him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who asks of you. And from him who takes away your goods do not ask them back. And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise. (Luke 6:27-31)
In our time, the Golden Rule (essentially taken from Luke 6:31, the last sentence in this quote) has become distorted into the paganized Eminem Ethic: “Do unto others as others do unto you.” But the Christian, like his Master, is called to be something far greater, and it is because he is a citizen of the Kingdom of Love, because God is Love, and because He first loved us, even while we were His enemies.
We will never overcome judgmentalism, prejudice, hatred, violence and war if we merely care for those who do the same for us. But a new Kingdom has been inaugurated, and its triumph is coming. There is only one way to become a citizen of that Kingdom.
Will you be one of them?
The Return to God
"Der verlorene Sohn hütet die Schweine," Sebald Beham, 1538
Sunday of the Prodigal Son, 2012
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.
One of the principal themes that we meditate upon during these weeks that precede Great Lent and during the Fast itself is forgiveness. And it’s no wonder, because the Christian Church is really the only place in which forgiveness makes any sense, the only place where forgiveness is actually possible.
If you’re standing in front of a judge who is about to sentence you for a crime, try saying, “Please forgive me!” Or imagine Richard Nixon, during the announcement of his resignation from the presidency in 1974, saying, “Please forgive me!” Or what if you get an “F” on an exam in school—can you say to your teacher, “Please forgive me”? Forgiveness is not really how our society operates. And yet we think about it a great deal here in the Church.
So what does it mean? And what can we learn about forgiveness from the Gospel theme for today, the parable of the Prodigal Son?
I think a lot of people think of forgiveness as a sort of deal we do with God. We come to church every so often (perhaps even regularly), give a certain amount toward our pledge, or even just say, “God, forgive me,” and God will of course forgive us—right? Actually—wrong. In fact, that sort of approach to Christian faith indicates that we don’t even understand what forgiveness really is.
So first let’s talk about what it’s not. Forgiveness is not a ticket to Heaven. Forgiveness is not for God to look at our sins and say, “Oh, I guess that’s all right. Just don’t do it again. Here, have some eternal life.” Forgiveness is not having some big mystical debt or punishment just wiped away.
To get inside what forgiveness actually is, consider your own experience. Have you ever had anyone say to you “I’m sorry,” but you just knew that they weren’t really sorry? You knew that there was no real change on their part, that they just wanted whatever had happened to be over with, that what had happened had not really affected them inside. They just wanted to get out of whatever bad experience awaited them, even if it was just the experience of continuing to be confronted with their failing. Or perhaps you were that person—not really sorry for what you did, but just sorry you got caught or sorry that something uncomfortable happened because of what you did.
But have you ever had someone who had failed you, who had betrayed you, who had hurt you, and who then came to you with genuine sorrow, not because they feared bad things happening to them, but because they could not bear to be separated from you? Their sorrow for their sin came out of the brokenness of the relationship with you, not from concern for their own comfort. That’s the basis for real forgiveness, because there is real repentance there, a real desire to be reunited, to be reconciled.
So, now think for a moment about your real relationship with Christ. When you say to Him, “Lord, have mercy,” are you saying it merely out of habit? Are you saying it out of a sense of obligation? Are you saying it just because it sounds nice when the choir sings it? Or are you actually aware that you need, well, mercy?
Are you aware of your separation from your Creator? If not, there are two possibilities: You are a saint and have a constant and unbroken awareness of God’s presence with you or you do not actually care to have a real relationship with your God, and so the separation doesn’t matter to you.
If you come and listen to the hymns of the Sunday Matins service leading up to and during Great Lent, you will hear a hymn sung shortly after the Gospel reading in which the writer says that he “tremble[s] for the terrible day of judgment.” Why would anyone tremble, though? Didn’t the writer of that hymn—probably a saint—have his ticket to Heaven? Even in his holiness, a saint is aware that he still has separation from God, and his thirst for God’s presence is so strong and his awareness of his inability to be perfect is so strong that he cries out to God, “Lord, have mercy!”
I think this is a real problem for many of us—we do not know that we are separated from God, and probably worse yet, we may not even care. But probably all of us do care for how we will spend eternity. But we may be deceived, thinking that all we need to do is to fulfill some religious “obligation,” and that ticket to Heaven will be ours. If we believe that—no matter how we may define our “obligation”—then we have believed a lie, and it is a lie whispered to us by the demons.
The truth behind all this is to be found in today’s Parable of the Prodigal Son. In this story, which we all know well, an ungrateful son takes what belongs to his father and wastes it all in a far-off country, eventually finding himself in total shame, total filthiness, total rejection from society.
We know how the story ends, but let’s imagine an alternate ending for this parable. Instead of the Prodigal “coming to himself” and going back to his father, he sends him a letter:
Dear Dad,As you may have heard, I am now living in a far-off country and am forced to feed pigs for a living. I’ve even gotten so hungry that the pigs’ food is starting to look pretty good to me. I messed up, and I’m sorry. I was hoping you might send over one of your servants with a bag of gold so I could pay off my debts and maybe buy something to eat. I’d appreciate it.
Love,
The Prodigal
That’s ridiculous, of course. But that’s basically the approach a lot of us take. We send God the occasional prayer-letter and want Him to bail us out in exchange. But that’s not what forgiveness is about. It’s not a bail-out from the Big Banker in the Sky.
What really happens in this parable is what forgiveness is all about. The Prodigal “comes to himself,” meaning that he really realizes what he has done, meaning that he really has become aware of his separation from his father, from his home, from his family. And then he goes home. And he makes no request other than “Please take me back.” He doesn’t even expect to be treated as a son. He just asks to be treated as a servant.
Ask yourself today whether you’re aware of the separation that exists between you and God. Really ask yourself that. If you don’t think there is one at all, well as much as it may be hard to hear, there actually is. If you think there isn’t one, ask yourself whether you have yet become perfect as the Heavenly Father is perfect, because that’s the only way there’s no separation.
If you’re not there yet, then that means you have some work to do. And if you can at least acknowledge that intellectually, but you have no idea where to start, no idea how to actually “come to yourself” and start heading toward the Father, then please, come to confession and let’s talk. It’s true: No one is perfect. But if we’re satisfied with that, then that means we are satisfied with living with the pigs, satisfied with the temporary pleasure and success the world has to offer, satisfied with forgetting about living with God and all our family in Heaven at the end of our lives. But if you’re not satisfied with that, if you want to know what you can do about overcoming that separation, then Christ and His Church stand ready to take you by the hand and lead you, step by step, back to the Father.
As ever, our forgiveness depends on our hearts. We cannot be forgiven if our hearts are not really set on drawing close to Christ. We cannot only set our minds or our sense of religious “obligation” on the forgiveness of God. We have to give our hearts. And you know when you’ve given your heart to something—it’s when you can never answer the question, “How much is enough?” There is no “enough” when it comes to the heart.
So what is forgiveness? It is to be received back by our Father. And how do we get there? We “come to ourselves,” return to Him, and open our hearts. Then we will gain not only the glory and beauty of His presence in this life, but eternity with Him, as well. As the great Christian writer C. S. Lewis once wrote, “Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither” (from The Joyful Christian).
So which way are you aiming?
May the God of peace, forgiveness and restoration, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, be therefore glorified always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
The Wise Men of Silesia
Throughout much of January and often into February, I spend close to 20-30 hours every week visiting the homes of parishioners and blessing them as part of the annual Theophany celebrations. I put several hundred miles on my car’s odometer during this time. Aside from the extra workload and of course the joy of visiting parishioners in their homes, I also particularly enjoy driving around the countryside in and near the Lehigh Valley. If I have some extra time, I may wander a bit and follow some rabbit trails that my GPS or simply something catching my eye might take me down. This past Saturday, the sign depicted in the photo above is what quite suddenly caught my attention.
As you no doubt know (especially if you’ve read this), I have a great curiosity for obscure religious groups. I must admit that, though they are perhaps somewhat known to many of my fellow Pennsylvanians, I had never heard of the Schwenkfelders. What could they be? And what was this remote little spot out in the woods with the weathered sign?
After seeing the sign, I pulled over, parked my car, and walked up the hillside in the direction of the sign’s arrow. There, I was greeted by a remarkably picturesque little cemetery. And of course, I find old cemeteries utterly irresistible.
Nearby was a fairly unremarkable building (the meeting house) that looked like a small church whose windows were boarded up and yet curiously seemed to have recently received a fresh coat of paint.
At one end of the meeting house was a stone set into the ground that gave some details of its use just over a century ago.
One of the things that fascinated me most about this site was one large memorial stone toward the back of the cemetery that was dedicated to the original Silesian Schwenkfelder immigrants who had come to the area almost 300 years before. The stone is of course interesting for its historical significance, but what particularly delighted my eye was to see that three of these eleven Schwenkfelders in fact bore the traditional names of the Three Wise Men who came from Persia to visit the child Jesus after His birth: Melchior, Casper and Balthaser (the latter two are most often spelled in English as Caspar and Balthazar).
It seems curiously coincidental that all three Magi would be represented among these folks, but perhaps there is a tradition among the the Schwenkfelders of using these names, if only because their namesake, Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig, bore one of them.
So who are these people? You can of course read about them on Wikipedia or at the website of the Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center, not to mention the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia (which often has rather droll entries for non-Roman Catholic religious entities), and there are of course whole books dedicated to these folks. But here’s the brief version of their story:
Caspar Schwenckfeld (ca. 1489 – 1561) himself was a Radical Reformation theologian in Silesia, having had a conversion experience when he was about 30, joining the Lutheran church. He eventually came to disagree on the sacramental reality of Holy Communion contra Luther and also held some rather odd Christological views (namely, that Jesus’ humanity was indeed real but was not consubstantial with Adam’s seed but represented a new creation, derived from His divinity). He broke from the Lutherans and gathered a small group of followers, who over the years were persecuted by the Lutheran state church.
About 1,500 Schwenkfelders still persisted at the opening of the 18th century, and they fled Austrian imperial persecution in Silesia, many finding refuge with the famous Count Zinzendorf, who is perhaps more notable for his connection with the Moravians (he later came to America and actually preached right here in Emmaus). In the 1730s, a number of Schwenkfelders immigrated to the Philadelphia area, forming a Society of Schenkfelders some fifty years later. They did not form an actual denominational body until 1909, by which time the Schwenkfelder community in Europe had become extinct. There are now only five Schwenkfelder churches in the world, and they are all within fifty miles of Philadelphia. It does not seem that they explicitly retain a common theology based on Schwenckfeld’s teachings but have become essentially congregationalist in that regard.
During my wandering on Saturday, I also found the new location of the old Kraussdale Schwenkfelders in Palm, Pennsylvania (a whimsically named town, considering our climate). It looks little different from most of the Lutheran churches in our area.
A mystery still remains for me, though, and that is how these Wise Men of Silesia came to bear these remarkably uncommon names in common with those ancient Persian magi. Perhaps that will be the occasion of a future visit to the aforesaid library.
Lecture at Cornell University, Feb. 14
I’m honored to be a guest of the Cornell University OCF! I will also have copies of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy on hand.
Canticle for the Meeting of our Lord
The Presentation in the Temple, Meister des Marienlebens, ca. 1460-75
Canticle for the Meeting of Our Lord
Long years ago I heard the Voice of God—
foreshadowing to me the news of Christ,
that death I would not see ’til I had seen
th’awaited coming of the Son of Man.
“Behold, the Virgin shall conceive,” I read,
Isaiah’s vision did foretell the One
to bring salvation to old Israel,
His flesh and blood to feed the race of man.
And so I prayed, my face upon the ground,
to see the Son of God, the great I AM,
the icon of the mighty Father God,
incarnate for us sons of Israel.
Both night and light, at every hour and time,
with tears I prayed: O Lord, O Lord! How long?
A Light we need, for revelation true,
the glory of Thy people Israel.
Then came the day, within the Temple’s gates,
wherein we saw the coming of the Lord—
a host of angels gathered ’round, I felt,
as two from Galilee did enter in:
The good old man, the righteous Joseph there,
and at his side a young and spotless Maid;
she held within her arms a newborn Child,
Who’d breathed our earthly air but forty days.
They brought with them the sacrifice, two birds,
according to the Law of Moses’ words.
And then, she brought to me the Child—my God
was laid so tenderly within my arms,
His infant breath upon my hands I felt,
His holy breath upon my sinful hands.
I stood, Creator held by creature’s arms,
the Living Word and Son of Most High God
now meets the tired and war-worn Israel,
the faithless bride has now beheld her groom.
“O Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant part
in peace, according to Thy word of truth:
Behold! my eyes have seen salvation’s birth,
which Thou prepared before the face of all,
the Light we need, for revelation true,
the glory of Thy people Israel.”
Then Joseph and the Virgin stood amazed,
to hear such truths as these which God had shown
to me so many long, long years before.
I gave to them the blessing of the Lord,
the Lord Who slept there as an infant Child,
then said to them, “Behold, O Virgin pure,
this Child will be the rise and fall of men
of Israel, a sign which shall be mocked;
And, lo, a sword will pierce thy soul as well,
the thoughts of many men will be revealed.”
Then prophetess, the righteous Anna, came,
and she rejoiced as well to see His day,
thanksgiving sang unto the Lord Most High,
and preached of the Redeemer’s blessed birth.
The Virgin and the good old man returned
to Galilee, performing all the things
required by Moses’ ancient Jewish Law.
The Child, He grew, His spirit strong and good,
with wisdom filled and filled with grace;
He bore mankind’s salvation on His back,
our essence taken to Himself, while yet
retaining without change His place as God.
Our God became a man that we might live
and grow as gods, to fullness of the Christ.
2004
Two Lectures Available Online
Two of my lectures from the recent Meeting the World series are now fully online, courtesy of Ancient Faith Radio:
- Meeting the World: Taking the Gospel Into Our Times and Our Places: Part 1, Part 2
A Peculiar People: Orthodox Christian Identity in a Hostile World: Part 1, Part 2
Three more will be available in the next several weeks, each broken into two parts. All the pieces in this series are about how Orthodox Christians can engage the surrounding culture.
Religion, Rules and Reality
The Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost
The evidence for this phenomenon is plentiful and pluriform online, so I will not bore you with examples. But perhaps you will remember this problem the next time someone posts something along these lines: “But you NEVER SAID ______ !” Yes, it is possible you never did say ______, but it is also just as likely that ______ was the subject of your doctoral dissertation, best-selling book, appearance on the evening news, official testimony before Congress, etc. But of course that wasn’t checked. ______ was not mentioned in this specific publication and therefore represents an egregious oversight on your part and is evidence that you in fact believe the opposite of ______.
Everything must now be a Summa, but it also must be a Summa of Sensitivity and Spectacle (not to mention, Speed), lest you lose your audience through soporific specificity. As someone with a daily experience of being steeped in iconography, I can of course appreciate the inner human longing at play here, but of course the true icon is not one that presents the viewer with the sum total of its subject, but rather with an introduction to it and an encounter with it.
I wrote those three paragraphs to give you those that follow.
In my oddly controversial post from last Thursday, I was excoriated by a number of commenters—both those whose comments were published and those whose moderation did not permit to see the light of day—who asserted to me again and again (and again, really, ad nauseam) that the Christian is saved by Jesus, not by rules and religion, that Jesus came to save us from rules and religion. And every time anyone countered that assertion, it was simply made again, as though it were some sort of battle cry that is self-evidently true and doctrinally menacing to all who hear it.
Yet, somehow, the vast swathe of Christian history and even the great sweep of currently living Christians manage along with spiritual lives that would suspiciously appear to be about “rules” and “religion.” Apparently, only the very small minority of Christians who hold to pop-Evangelicalism actually have a “personal relationship with Christ,” and even if some of them will allow that there are “personal relationship” Christians within all those rule-ridden religions, it is in spite of (not because of) all that pomp and circumstantial stuff.
But to those of us who live somewhere within or even near what history shows us is traditional Christianity (with all those bishops, sacraments, incense, and so on) hear such claims as utter nonsense. I have never yet met anyone who believes and practices such things who actually believes that he really has no access to God, that he must go “through” some clergyman, that his faith isn’t at all personal, that merely following rules and going through magical ritual motions will guarantee that heaven everlasting is his eternal reward.
Yes, they may say, perhaps rule-ridden religion is not the official teaching of such churches, perhaps they may teach that it is grace that saves the believer, but we know better. We know that they really just skip over certain obviously damning Bible verses that instantly refute their whole way of life. We know that they’re not really serious when they say they believe in grace, salvation through faith, and so on.
And to that, I say: Well, so long as you’re going to tell me what I believe, you may as well come up with something rather more colorful and interesting. (After all, my objections won’t count.) We’re probably also sacrificing chickens late on Wednesday nights and bow down before fish-headed gods and make dark deals with the Illuminati. It’s all quite obvious, you know.
But, if perhaps, you may be willing to listen for a moment, rather than instantly assume that every refutation of pop-Evangelicalism necessarily constitutes an endorsement of Pharisaism, then perhaps you will find something other than what you assumed and expected. You may well be confused, I grant you, because us “religious” types turn out not actually to be what your lot has been railing against for some centuries.
That said, at least as far as Orthodox Christians are concerned (I cannot speak for “religion”), we are saved by grace through faith. There is no act, not even the act of faith, not even praying the “Sinner’s Prayer” with utmost sincerity, that can save us. Only God saves. Only God transforms. Only God heals. And He also does not owe us that healing, no matter what we do. We cannot obligate Him in any way nor do anything that will compel Him to grant salvation. Salvation is indeed a free gift. It cannot be earned or bought, not even by saying the right words in a formulaic prayer or having a conversion experience.
That said, why is it that we Orthodox seem to have so many “rules,” so much “religion”? Well, here’s the thing: For us, salvation is not merely about getting to go to the Good Place rather than the Bad Place when we die, preceded by trying to be moral and making sure to recruit more people for the Moral Recruiters Going to Heaven Club.
And let’s be honest here: That’s what pop-Evangelicalism boils down to—going to heaven and getting more people on board. You of course ought to be moral along the way, and if you are obviously and constantly immoral, perhaps you never really were on board, but since even morality is a “good work,” we know it doesn’t actually have anything to do with getting that free ticket to the Good Place.
So, why do the Orthodox have so much stuff to do? Why are we surrounded by structure, customs, complex worship, strange vestments, otherworldly music, and even crazy people who dress all in black and go off in the forests and deserts and seem to just pray and work all the time? What’s with all the stuff?
At its heart is this basic affirmation: God became man. That means that God became matter, that He became part of His creation. In becoming part of His creation, He made it possible for us to touch the previously untouchable, to see the previously invisible, to access the previously inaccessible. God became matter, and boy-howdy, does that matter. But how does that add up to so much physicality (and that’s what all the “stuff” really is and why it bothers you) in Christian life?
You may never really have noticed this, but there is a lot of stuff-related stuff going on in the Bible: A dead man comes back to life when he falls on the bones of the Prophet Elisha. The people of Israel are healed of snake-bite when they look to a bronze image of a serpent. God directly commands an incredibly complex, expensive and image-filled context for worship. Jesus uses mud to heal a blind man’s eyes. And why is it that pretty much every time the Bible gives us a peek into heaven, we keep seeing an altar, incense, and all that “religious” stuff? We could go on. But of course the biggest piece of matter of all is the matter that was (and is!) Jesus.
But Jesus came to save us from all that, you might say. All of that “stuff” was not His original plan, you might say—and someone did actually say that to me, as though God was somehow taken by surprise when mankind fell and needed to come up with an improvised Plan B. Or, in the word of Jefferson Bethke the New Theologian, Jesus came to “abolish religion.” Yet, what Jesus actually said was that He came to fulfill what had come before, not to destroy it. Yet somehow you want me to believe that fulfill actually means destroy.
What if instead of dealing with mankind in one way for thousands of years and then abruptly changing His mind and doing something entirely different, God was actually gradually opening up His revelation like a flower until it came to full blossom in Christ? What if the Law, the prophets, and even all of the “stuff” were not just a temporary band-aid to be ripped off when the real deal came along, but actually constitute hints and foreshadowings that are fully revealed in Christ? What if a grossly bifurcated history of God’s dealing with mankind actually makes no sense in the light of Christian history?
What if God is actually totally consistent through the whole Bible and even in the nineteen centuries after it?
No, you don’t see it that way, you say. And why can’t you see it that way? It’s probably because you have latched onto the obsessions of an ex-Augustinian monk with the abuses of late-medieval Roman Catholicism and given them legs and turned them into a whole theology that is anti-stuff and therefore horrified at “rules” and “religion.” It is probably also due to your ignorance (and here, I really do not blame you, but now that you’ve been informed, you really should look it up) of Christian history, that details a faith community that lived the Christian life in intense fulness, including an exceptionally detailed interaction with physical matter and all that that entails, with all the bishops and sacraments and incense and so on.
For you, all of that material “stuff” gets between me and God, but that makes no sense to me, because God chose to use matter—He became matter!—in order to connect to man! These things aren’t gateways that shut the door to God. This materiality is actually the very pathway to experience of the divine.
But what if the Apostles actually did succeed in their mission? What if they really formed communities that really worshiped Christ the right way? Isn’t it reasonable to expect that believers getting together for worship in a decent, orderly fashion will look an awful lot like they have “rules” and “religion”? And isn’t it reasonable to expect that people who take Jesus seriously when He said that we have to eat His flesh and drink His blood to have life in us will behave in an exceptionally reverent manner when they do so? Don’t you think a few “rules” might be in order when approaching the King of Kings in such a way that we don’t get sick or die by doing so unworthily?
The reality is that when people live in communities together, they develop rituals and customs that connect them together and define their identities, even in things as simple as a handshake (which accomplishes nothing yet somehow says quite a lot). And the Church is not just any human community. It is the very Body of Christ, constituted and blessed by Christ Himself to be the very pillar and ground of the truth, which is why not just any self-chosen group of believers can lay claim to that identity. There can be only one Church, because there is only one Christ, Who has only one Bride. The Lord is not a polygamist, and He is not betrothed to a woman with multiple personality disorder, either.
Why is it so bizarre to think that the basic elements of culture could actually be Christianized? Why is it that you want so much of life to remain secular, with all of the “stuff” in my life utterly untouched by holiness, by the actual presence of God within physical matter?
You see, that’s what the problem is here. Human life is very much shaped by materiality, by ritual, by custom, by traditional wisdom and ways of doing things. When you say that Jesus wants us not to have “rules” and “religion,” what I hear you saying is that you want most of my life to remain outside of my spiritual life. But I want it to be inside, not outside. And all of this “stuff” is how we do that.
I don’t harbor the delusion that those things save me. They don’t. But they are part of my cooperation with Christ to “press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me,” to “work out [my] salvation with fear and trembling.”
Salvation is not something that God does to me. It is something that He offers me, but that I must receive truly willingly. And the last time I checked, because I am still a sinner, my will was not yet fully aligned with His. That’s why we have received the tradition of the Apostles. And I will continue to obey the words of the Apostle, when he says that we are to hold fast to the traditions that he and the other Apostles taught, whether it was by word of mouth or by written letters.
Does this mean that we Orthodox are enslaved somehow, that we are weighted down with rules? That is no more the case than that an athlete is restrained by the training and diet and exercise he must undertake in order to run his race. We are of course free not to run the race, and we are free not to train. But if we are going to train, it’s going to take some doing.
Does that mean we live in terror from day to day, without an absolute epistemological certainty that we will be going to the Good Place after death? Not at all. You see (and note well here the irony), faith in Christ is a relationship, not an absolute, immovable status. As with any relationship of love, either lover can walk out and end it. Christ won’t, of course, but we humans can and do. But the more we are faithful, when we endure to the end, then we are healed (which is also the literal meaning of the Greek sozo usually translated as “save”).
God calls us to become partakers of the divine nature, to become perfect people, to the fulness of the stature of Christ, not to “get saved” and then just try to be moral and be sure to recruit more people for the Moral Recruiters Going to Heaven Club while we wait to die.
The Orthodox Christian faith offers the possibility for the healing of the human soul, the transfiguration of the human person, mystical communion with the divine right now, and it’s all accomplished by actual, physical contact with the awesome God of the universe, Who is alone worthy of worship. We just won’t settle for less. What Christ offers is far too magnificent.
