In 1996, two contemporary spiritual fathers, Fr. Teofil (Paraian) and Fr. Arsenie (Papacioc), met at Techirghiol Monastery in Romania. Fr. Arsenie was a spiritual son of Elder Cleopa (Ilie). He was imprisoned numerous times by the authorities, and at times lived in the wilderness to avoid further arrest. Although an ascetic himself, he is known for counsels on moderation, in combination with continual watchfulness. Today, at the age of 95, he continues to be the spiritual father at Techirghiol Women's Monastery. Fr. Teofil was a hieromonk at the Transylvanian monastery of Simbata de Sus. Born blind, he nevertheless completed his theological studies, learned three languages, and stuidied Patristic texts recorded on cassette tapes. He became one of the great luminaries of the Romanian Church in the twentieth century. He reposed on October 29, 2009, in the rank of archimandrite. Here is a part of that conversation:
Fr. T: Are you certain that all will be well for you in eternity?
Fr. A: I could not say that, most venerable Father! Please, believe me when I say, "I'm the only one who won't be saved!"
Fr. T: Do you believe so?
Fr. A: Yes, but I have great hope!
Fr. T: If you're hopeful, why do you express yourself like that?
Fr. A: The mind in hell and the hope in God! Without the grace of God, our deeds don't save us in any way.
Fr. T: Well . . . but it's impossible for God not to want to save us!
Fr. A: Yes, but I can't impose conditions on Him!
Fr. T: Well, without imposing conditions, God being Love . . .
Fr. A: Most venerable Father, I somehow in all honesty before a father confessor say: I will be saved because I suffered . . .
Fr. T: I honestly tell you that I have the certainty that I will go to the good, but not for my deeds!
Fr. A: I only hope!
Fr. T: Well, I can say that I have the certitude that if I hope . . .
Fr. A: This is not an Orthodox position!
Fr. T: Maybe I'm not Orthodox?
Fr. A: The truth is that our deeds don't save us in any way without God's mercy!
Fr. T: Do you know what I'll say to God when I'm standing in front of Him? Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner! I won't say anything else to Him!
Fr. A: I made myself a [burial] cross at Zamfira Monastery, where I confess to Fr. Gavril (Stoica), and this is what I wrote on the Cross: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus--forgive me!
Fr. T: I can't imagine God saying, "I don't want you," after I've lived with Him all of my life.
Fr. A: He loves us so much, and this gives me hope!
Fr. T: Father, if we count on God's mercy, we need not hesitate!
Fr. A: I don't want to count on God's mercy without considering our life and deeds. The salvation process involves not just the grace of God, but also our deeds. If only He could find us on the way. The struggle is to be on the way and to be honest with the fight!
Fr. T: I don't worry, because I have confidence in God's goodness!
Fr. A: I worry, but I'm also hopeful!
Fr. T: It's extraordinary when you say this, since God is our Father!
Fr. A: Yes, but I can't say that I have the certitude of salvation!
Fr. T: But why can't you say it?
Fr. A: If God allows me, I will say this on my deathbed: "God, I thank Thee that I die a monk!" But I have the thought that my deeds are leading me to hell. If God wants to save me, He can do it! But I can't say for sure that He will forgive me.
Fr. T: But I am sure that He forgives us!
Fr. A: I also have hope in the Lord! He even told St. Silouan, "Keep thy mind in hell and despair not!" The world does not yet know how much God loves us, how "passionately in love" with us God is!
Fr. T: You see how beautifully you say it.
Fr. A: But I can't say that I have certitude. Only the Protestants say that they have the surety of salvation. For our deeds don't save us without the grace of God; and the grace of God only comes if there is authentic humility. Can I say that I'm humble?
Monday, August 30, 2010
Two Romanian Elders Discuss Salvation and God's Mercy
This dialog appeared in The Orthodox Word 272 (2010) 148-51. I'm hardly an expert, but it seems to me that it beautifully captures the complexity of Orthodox soteriology. There's always this tension between faith and humility, such that it's almost impossible to express without an apparent contradiction.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
the impermeable Shire
I'm not sure I have a favorite movie, but if forced to answer the question, I usually refer to the Lord of the Rings project (which is technically more than one movie, but it's a more satisfying answer than nothing). It was an amazing effort, and the result was probably about as successful as anyone could have hoped for. But I'm really a fan of the books. I can enjoy the movies, and that says a lot, but my loyalty is to the original.
Can you blame me? I started reading LOTR when I was in fourth grade and averaged something like 1.5 reps per year until I finished high school (including the Hobbit and the Silmarillion). I traced maps, charted family trees, practiced runes, and imagined myself in the stories for countless hours while mowing the lawn. Those books were the gold standard not only for their own story but for just about everything else I ever read.
Fortunately, I was not quite such a fanatic by the time the movies came out. I was much less obsessed, and I think in general I had matured to the point that I realized a movie must always distort the book on which it is based. To a great extent, I could accept the changes made. They ran upwards of three hours each, with extended DVD versions even longer, but there was still no way they could include everything. And some interactions just don't work on film like they do on paper. I get that.
I probably hadn't watched the movies since 2004, when the last one came out on DVD. Sitting down to watch just one of them without the others seems silly, and carving out enough time to watch all three extended versions (alone, because the kids weren't old enough, and Julie wasn't crazy enough) is no small task. But for a while I'd been thinking about just starting to watch in bits and pieces and eventually getting through. I finally started the other day, and of course it didn't happen like that. I watched roughly one full disc at a sitting and finished in less than a week.
I was surprised to find that, not only could I stomach most of the changes, but I actually had that tingling in the back of my head when the elvish contingent showed up for the battle of Helm's Deep. It's spurious but moving nonetheless.
But the Scouring of the Shire. Jackson not only ignored it--he threw it hurtling from the top of Orthanc to a grisly death below. (Don't feel bad for Saruman--he may not make it to the end of the movie, but he gets an inflated role earlier to make up for it.) The discovery of Longbottom Leaf is retained (at least in the extended version), but is reduced to mere nostalgia instead of the ominous sign that it is in the book.
You could chalk it up to mere length, but as I recall they explicitly stated their reasons, and a significant motivation was that it just seemed to drag out the story anyway. The war is over, so wrap things up and be done with it. But this time watching, I had an epiphany. (I'm sure many have seen it already, but I'm slow with these things.) The Scouring of the Shire (and its absence) has a lot to do with the context in which the story is written.
If you don't know, the Scouring of the Shire is the penultimate act of the story. After the war ends, Aragorn is crowned and married, and everyone travels back home, there remains the task of mending the hobbits' beloved Shire. It comes out that Saruman was deeply involved with that part of Middle Earth, and his henchmen were running things at the expense of the hobbits. The movies get his obsession with machinery and progress; in the books this obsession wrecks the agrarian Shire even after the war seems over. The four hobbits return, Saruman meets his end, and the cleanup process begins.
Tolkien wrote LOTR in the context of WWII. As in most of Europe, the war did not end for England when Berlin fell. There was physical damage to repair, and there were lasting political changes as a result of the war effort (many of which, I would guess, Tolkien also thought needed repair). War had changed the home front, even if its worst effects were elsewhere.
But in 21st c. America (and although Jackson is from New Zealand, I still think it's an American movie), wars don't affect us here at home. Sure, you might get the occasional raid by a Black Rider or two, but the real combat is safely contained somewhere else. Our lifestyle doesn't have to change (if it did, the terrorists would win), our economy doesn't change (well . . . ). War is someone else's problem. The only negative effect is when soldiers return with their scars and have trouble assimilating back into "normal" life. And the life they return to is hopelessly normal. So, instead of the Scouring, we get a scene of the four heroes sitting in the Green Dragon, exchanging knowing looks.
Of course the Scouring seems to drag out the story needlessly when viewed from our perspective. Having a ravaged home after returning from war seems like a superfluous and cruel addition, not a predictable consequence. Tolkien couldn't write his story without it, because it was the stark reality of war. Jackson couldn't write his story with it, because if our wars change anyone's life, it's certainly not ours.
Can you blame me? I started reading LOTR when I was in fourth grade and averaged something like 1.5 reps per year until I finished high school (including the Hobbit and the Silmarillion). I traced maps, charted family trees, practiced runes, and imagined myself in the stories for countless hours while mowing the lawn. Those books were the gold standard not only for their own story but for just about everything else I ever read.
Fortunately, I was not quite such a fanatic by the time the movies came out. I was much less obsessed, and I think in general I had matured to the point that I realized a movie must always distort the book on which it is based. To a great extent, I could accept the changes made. They ran upwards of three hours each, with extended DVD versions even longer, but there was still no way they could include everything. And some interactions just don't work on film like they do on paper. I get that.
I probably hadn't watched the movies since 2004, when the last one came out on DVD. Sitting down to watch just one of them without the others seems silly, and carving out enough time to watch all three extended versions (alone, because the kids weren't old enough, and Julie wasn't crazy enough) is no small task. But for a while I'd been thinking about just starting to watch in bits and pieces and eventually getting through. I finally started the other day, and of course it didn't happen like that. I watched roughly one full disc at a sitting and finished in less than a week.
I was surprised to find that, not only could I stomach most of the changes, but I actually had that tingling in the back of my head when the elvish contingent showed up for the battle of Helm's Deep. It's spurious but moving nonetheless.
But the Scouring of the Shire. Jackson not only ignored it--he threw it hurtling from the top of Orthanc to a grisly death below. (Don't feel bad for Saruman--he may not make it to the end of the movie, but he gets an inflated role earlier to make up for it.) The discovery of Longbottom Leaf is retained (at least in the extended version), but is reduced to mere nostalgia instead of the ominous sign that it is in the book.
You could chalk it up to mere length, but as I recall they explicitly stated their reasons, and a significant motivation was that it just seemed to drag out the story anyway. The war is over, so wrap things up and be done with it. But this time watching, I had an epiphany. (I'm sure many have seen it already, but I'm slow with these things.) The Scouring of the Shire (and its absence) has a lot to do with the context in which the story is written.
If you don't know, the Scouring of the Shire is the penultimate act of the story. After the war ends, Aragorn is crowned and married, and everyone travels back home, there remains the task of mending the hobbits' beloved Shire. It comes out that Saruman was deeply involved with that part of Middle Earth, and his henchmen were running things at the expense of the hobbits. The movies get his obsession with machinery and progress; in the books this obsession wrecks the agrarian Shire even after the war seems over. The four hobbits return, Saruman meets his end, and the cleanup process begins.
Tolkien wrote LOTR in the context of WWII. As in most of Europe, the war did not end for England when Berlin fell. There was physical damage to repair, and there were lasting political changes as a result of the war effort (many of which, I would guess, Tolkien also thought needed repair). War had changed the home front, even if its worst effects were elsewhere.
But in 21st c. America (and although Jackson is from New Zealand, I still think it's an American movie), wars don't affect us here at home. Sure, you might get the occasional raid by a Black Rider or two, but the real combat is safely contained somewhere else. Our lifestyle doesn't have to change (if it did, the terrorists would win), our economy doesn't change (well . . . ). War is someone else's problem. The only negative effect is when soldiers return with their scars and have trouble assimilating back into "normal" life. And the life they return to is hopelessly normal. So, instead of the Scouring, we get a scene of the four heroes sitting in the Green Dragon, exchanging knowing looks.
Of course the Scouring seems to drag out the story needlessly when viewed from our perspective. Having a ravaged home after returning from war seems like a superfluous and cruel addition, not a predictable consequence. Tolkien couldn't write his story without it, because it was the stark reality of war. Jackson couldn't write his story with it, because if our wars change anyone's life, it's certainly not ours.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Passion Gospels
I was curious about exactly how much material was covered in the twelve Passion Gospel readings. The passages are:
Even so, it should be expected that some of the material unique to Luke will be omitted, and that is in fact the case. Particularly, Luke's longer account of the walk to Golgotha is missing, and more notably, the entire hearing before Herod. The Synoptic account of Jesus's prayers in the Garden also fails to make the cut, but it does turn up in the composite reading from the preceding vespers.
The overall flow of the twelve readings is chronological, with a good deal of overlap:
I'm still a bit puzzled as to the omission of the hearing before Herod. Was it incidental, merely a by-product of the overall preference for John and Matthew? Or was it intentional, and if so, why? I'm probably just forgetting something, but I can't recall Herod being mentioned in the liturgical texts of Holy Week. That wouldn't necessarily explain the omission, but it would be consistent. Perhaps it was enough to show both the Jewish side and the Roman side in Jesus's death. Is Herod superfluous in that sense? He seems to have a unique perspective, being mostly interested in Jesus as a wonder-worker. It's an obsession that can preach, but perhaps in the overall message of Jesus's death, it's just not that important.
- John 13:31--18:1
- John 18:1-28
- Matt 26:57-75
- John 18:28--19:16
- Matt 27:3-32
- Mark 15:16-32
- Matt 27:33-54
- Luke 23:32-49
- John 19:25-37
- Mark 15:43-47
- John 19:38-42
- Matt 27:62-66
Even so, it should be expected that some of the material unique to Luke will be omitted, and that is in fact the case. Particularly, Luke's longer account of the walk to Golgotha is missing, and more notably, the entire hearing before Herod. The Synoptic account of Jesus's prayers in the Garden also fails to make the cut, but it does turn up in the composite reading from the preceding vespers.
The overall flow of the twelve readings is chronological, with a good deal of overlap:
- Johannine Last Supper teachings
- arrest, Jewish trial, denial (John)
- Jewish trial, denial (Matthew)
- Roman trial, mockery (John)
- Judas, Roman trial, mockery (Matthew)
- mockery, crucifixion (Mark)
- crucifixion, death (Matthew)
- crucifixion, death (Luke)
- crucifixion, death (John)
- burial (Mark)
- burial (John)
- guard (Matthew)
I'm still a bit puzzled as to the omission of the hearing before Herod. Was it incidental, merely a by-product of the overall preference for John and Matthew? Or was it intentional, and if so, why? I'm probably just forgetting something, but I can't recall Herod being mentioned in the liturgical texts of Holy Week. That wouldn't necessarily explain the omission, but it would be consistent. Perhaps it was enough to show both the Jewish side and the Roman side in Jesus's death. Is Herod superfluous in that sense? He seems to have a unique perspective, being mostly interested in Jesus as a wonder-worker. It's an obsession that can preach, but perhaps in the overall message of Jesus's death, it's just not that important.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
my story (or a version thereof)
In a group that Julie and I meet with, we've been discussing "our stories." I've long held the conviction that such things are necessarily selective and fluid, and rarely told the same way twice. So even though I've written down my story before, it's never come out quite this way. Read it as much for what it says about me now as for what it may say about my past:
My governing sins have always been in the areas of pride and vainglory. I have generally been confident in my own intellectual abilities, at the expense of everything else. I think I believed in God from as early as I can remember, but I didn't really start to take my faith seriously until I reached sixth grade. From that point on, I found ways to serve pride through religion.
My Sunday School teacher decided to pay students money as an incentive to read the Bible. That kind of mercenary spirituality would continue into my teen years, with quiz team and a camp scholarship program that required things like reading and Scripture memory. I also began to make friends with men in the church who were older than my parents. As a general practice, this could probably be a good opportunity for spiritual influence on youth, but in my case I saw it as another recognition of intellectual maturity beyond my years. They got me hooked on Christian apologetics, which encouraged me to "share my faith" through argumentation. Throughout high school, it became my personal crusade to show others that Christians (namely, I) could be intellectually respectable.
From time to time adults, impressed with my abilities, would suggest that I become a pastor. At first I scorned the idea, thinking that my intellectual abilities were too great for professional ministry. I had chosen engineering as a career when I was in fourth grade, and I wasn't ready to give up the opportunity to remind people of that choice. I spiritualized it by identifying a calling in my intellect--I, as a smart guy, was best suited to influence other smart guys. Anything less would be a waste of the talent God had given me. But my pride was multifaceted, and it wasn't long before I found a way to make professional ministry serve its ends.
I suppose there is probably some positive use to the notion of ministry as a higher calling, but it's hard for me to see it as anything better than a lesser evil. Men--especially men with a personality to lead--will generally take pride in their career. If they're going to explain why they chose the path of ministry, it will need to be framed as a step above whatever else they could have done. Hearing enough of this sort of thing eventually had its effect on me, and one summer I finally decided to throw my symbolic stick in the fire and dedicate my life to whatever God wanted me to do. Conveniently, God still wanted me to show off my intellect, just in a different field. I made a deal with him at that point--if he would save me from the embarrassment of a weak public speaking ability, I would go to Bible college. At the time, I really did believe that God must have made the difference; now, I'm not so sure it wasn't just the force of my own determination to excel in a different area. Either way, my pride remained.
My pastor tried to advise me against Bible college. He suggested getting a bachelor's degree in some other field, then going to seminary. That way I would have a fall-back career if I needed to support myself, and I would get a higher-level ministry education. I figured school was mostly just a formality anyway--I could learn whatever I needed to, when I needed to--so I wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. Worrying about a fall-back career would just be a sign of weakness. At the same time, I did recognize something about my own tendencies. I was genuinely concerned that if I gave myself too much opportunity I might choose something more comfortable than ministry. But the advice he gave was wiser than I imagined at the time, and it was arrogant to write it off so quickly.
In college, my focus began to shift away from apologetics to the core areas I was studying--Bible and theology. No longer surrounded by unbelievers who needed to be convinced that Christianity was true or respectable, I got my thrills from arguing with classmates about mostly pointless theological controversies. I was attracted (even when I disagreed) to the most intellectual and controversial of professors, and when authority clashed with heresy, I chose the latter. Even so, I had absorbed the narrow focus of the fundamentalist college I was attending. I ended up going on to seminary after all, and I chose one that was comfortably similar in doctrine but intellectually more rigorous.
Even going to seminary was a last-minute decision. It was not my original plan, but as I neared the end of my undergraduate studies, I realized that I was too young for the kind of job I really wanted. Also, school was comfortable for me and held less uncertainty than ministry. Many of the same trends continued in seminary, as I gravitated toward the areas that would be most intellectually challenging, most obscure, most academic. Not surprisingly, I decided before I was done that I would rather teach than pursue pastoral ministry, which meant I would have to go on for a Ph.D. But there was a spiritual dimension to this shift that took me longer to recognize.
I don't think I ever really had much of a true devotional life. In youth group, I was expected to keep a journal of prayer and scriptural meditation. It was checked regularly for completeness, but not at a level that would distinguish real interaction with God from intellectual contemplation of the assigned passages and meticulous maintenance of prayer lists. From time to time, college and seminary classes also required me to keep some kind of devotional journal, and I would comply as necessary. But aside from that, I generally assumed that my school work was spiritual enough. Early on, I developed a methodology for what I was doing. If the goal was to know and serve God better, I needed to understand what he expected of me. To understand that, I needed to grasp biblical theology and praxis. To grasp that, I needed to read and analyze Scripture intelligently. To read and analyze, I needed to get as close to the original texts as I could. And so, my intellectual pursuits were organized around acquiring the tools I needed to do all of this for myself, not to rely on anyone else's conclusions. Assuming I was actually working toward that goal, it all should have added up to spiritual growth, without adding anything else to the mix.
In the same way that I had no real relationship with God, after marriage, I had no real relationship with my wife. Most of my time was devoted to school and work. Even when we were together in our apartment, we were usually doing different things. I did not concern myself with what she wanted or even needed, and I justified it all as a temporary condition that would stop when I was done with school. But school dragged on, and things didn't change.
I was required to serve in church during college and seminary, and so I did. I genuinely cared about doing well whatever I was given, and I honestly looked for ways to apply my abilities to the greatest use. But I don't think it was ever an expression of love for God or even for other people. It was preparation for my chosen career, and I naturally wanted to do it well. But eventually my intellectual pursuits began to outpace other aspects of my life. I sensed a widening gulf between what I thought and what I did. And I knew that there were limits to what I could say out loud or apply in real life. My eccentricity was accepted to a degree, but church life was insufficiently flexible to accommodate full disclosure. That's when I realized that I could not be in paid ministry, whether I wanted to or not, and I also realized that I wouldn't have much future teaching in the kind of schools I'd attended.
So by the time I started my Ph.D. program, I was back to looking at the secular arena for my career. I figured that if necessary a Ph.D. in Semitic languages could be applied in a seminary, but I was really interested in teaching in a secular or at least not-so-fundamentalist college or university, where no one would care exactly what I thought about conclusions, as long as I could teach the right methods. It would probably have been less costly in terms of time, money, energy, and relationships if I'd just decided to pursue a different career altogether. But I was trying to save face, to prove to myself and others that I had not wasted the past several years of my life on a career that I would never pursue.
The crux came when I finished coursework on my Ph.D. and simultaneously became a father. In my self-centered pursuit of academic goals, we had put off having kids as long as we could. But now I had more freedom with how I used my time and more motivation to get things right. I somehow sensed that real life was becoming considerably more important than academia, and I pushed school to the back burner, in favor of sorting out more practical issues like faith and politics. I was still self-centered, to be sure, but I think it was an important step to open up my closed, little world to the influences of reality. I concluded pretty readily that I could not continue down the same "spiritual" path--which, as I said, was never really all that spiritual in the first place. But now it was intellectually impossible, like trying to go back and watch a magic show after you've seen how the trick works. No force of will can make you believe again.
I had followed the path to its end and found that it didn't really lead anywhere. Moving forward would mean making my own path (and knowing it). The only option that retained hope was to back up and turn aside into something altogether different. But I had become so jaded that even this move felt like I was still deliberately charting my own course--like there was no God to be found at the end, only more disappointment. But I could hold out hope that I would never get far enough to find out. I began exploring other faith traditions, looking for something that I could "live with"--something I could respect as honest about itself as a tradition, and intellectually challenging enough to hold my interest. I hadn't really changed all that much--it was still about what would make me feel a certain way, and still without any expectation of a real encounter with a real God.
My first trial was characteristic. I explored Rabbinic Judaism mostly through reading, without opening up to anyone else about my interest. One significant change was that I was by this point pursuing something with a more spiritual dimension to it. So I spent a good deal of time trying out Jewish prayer. But I was still not prepared to follow any path of conversion that would require me to start over. Some things I could give up, but not my freedom to challenge the status quo.
I briefly considered Messianic Judaism as an alternative. It would not require a formal conversion, or a renunciation of anything in particular, and there was a better chance that my wife would go along with it. But it had too many of the same problems that had turned me off to Evangelicalism, in some cases to a greater degree. Ultimately, it was not a viable option, but this stage included some important turning points. One was that I finally opened up to my wife about what was going on. We were still miles apart on these things, but at least I was operating somewhat outside of my own head. Another was that it raised questions for me about early Christianity, which pointed me in the direction of Eastern Orthodoxy. It was a purely intellectual progression at the time, but I don't know how else I would have got there.
Eastern Orthodoxy was a viable candidate in terms of my search. It definitely had a deep sense of tradition and the potential to be very satisfying intellectually. Also, my Ph.D. work had provided me with some useful exposure to Orthodoxy, so that I not only had some sense of what it was and how to get more information, but I knew Eastern Orthodox people whom I could contact for help. But the real difference was the reality of the encounter. Yes, Orthodoxy responded to the questions I was asking; but it went far beyond that by both raising and answering the questions that I ought to have been asking but wasn't. It finally took me beyond what my own intellect could expect, to a real encounter with a real God. No, there were no heavenly visions, no physical symptoms. It was not even what I would have characterized at the time as a spiritual experience. But I was quietly carried along, until I realized after the fact just how far behind I'd left my initial pursuits.
Orthodoxy has plenty of room for intellectual exercise--that was never in question. But it also has centuries of experience ministering to the needs of the most common, illiterate peasant. It has an arsenal of very practical tools for the day-to-day spiritual life. So in addition to a lot of reading about a lot of different things, I was able to immerse myself in more practical matters of prayer, fasting, liturgy, and obedience. These disciplines did their work of softening my heart, to the point where I could accept the teachings of the Church not for their intellectual impressiveness, but implicitly as the faith of the saints. Most importantly, I was finally confronted with the depth of pride in my own life and how it had shaped my story.
One of the most perplexing and frustrating things for me about Orthodoxy was its lack of urgency. I had grown up on the standard appeal: "If you were to die today . . . " But here was a faith that welcomed this questioning seeker with a firm but gentle, "No." No, you may not convert right now. Seriously? Your wife is not with you. But what if I die before she changes her mind? If I had good reason to suspect you were going to die soon, that might change things, but since I don't--No.
So the first lesson of humility was accepting that some priest could tell me it wasn't time. The second was accepting that my own failures had a lot to do with the circumstances in our family. The third was realizing that there would be no quick fix. No, saying a prayer and writing down the date so I can remember when it happened won't do it. I have to wait for God's timing. But in the meantime, there was a fourth lesson--the long, slow process of repairing the damage--of becoming the person I should have been in the first place. And there's no guarantee attached to that either. I'm doing it because it's what I'm supposed to do--if I get there, all glory to God, whether my wife follows or not.
Along the way there have been encouraging moments--like when the priest finally did say "yes," after asking my wife, after she miraculously agreed, after she even allowed the kids to enter the Church with me. But we're still far from being on the same page. And I'm still far from being as humble as I should be. So every day I forget what I'm supposed to be learning. And every day God quietly reminds me. It won't be fixed by my intellect or my effort. And "fixed" won't even necessarily be what I think it should. It will only work out in his timing, according to his plan. I get that on some level, but I still have a long way to go. My Teacher is patient, and I know by that that he is not me.
My governing sins have always been in the areas of pride and vainglory. I have generally been confident in my own intellectual abilities, at the expense of everything else. I think I believed in God from as early as I can remember, but I didn't really start to take my faith seriously until I reached sixth grade. From that point on, I found ways to serve pride through religion.
My Sunday School teacher decided to pay students money as an incentive to read the Bible. That kind of mercenary spirituality would continue into my teen years, with quiz team and a camp scholarship program that required things like reading and Scripture memory. I also began to make friends with men in the church who were older than my parents. As a general practice, this could probably be a good opportunity for spiritual influence on youth, but in my case I saw it as another recognition of intellectual maturity beyond my years. They got me hooked on Christian apologetics, which encouraged me to "share my faith" through argumentation. Throughout high school, it became my personal crusade to show others that Christians (namely, I) could be intellectually respectable.
From time to time adults, impressed with my abilities, would suggest that I become a pastor. At first I scorned the idea, thinking that my intellectual abilities were too great for professional ministry. I had chosen engineering as a career when I was in fourth grade, and I wasn't ready to give up the opportunity to remind people of that choice. I spiritualized it by identifying a calling in my intellect--I, as a smart guy, was best suited to influence other smart guys. Anything less would be a waste of the talent God had given me. But my pride was multifaceted, and it wasn't long before I found a way to make professional ministry serve its ends.
I suppose there is probably some positive use to the notion of ministry as a higher calling, but it's hard for me to see it as anything better than a lesser evil. Men--especially men with a personality to lead--will generally take pride in their career. If they're going to explain why they chose the path of ministry, it will need to be framed as a step above whatever else they could have done. Hearing enough of this sort of thing eventually had its effect on me, and one summer I finally decided to throw my symbolic stick in the fire and dedicate my life to whatever God wanted me to do. Conveniently, God still wanted me to show off my intellect, just in a different field. I made a deal with him at that point--if he would save me from the embarrassment of a weak public speaking ability, I would go to Bible college. At the time, I really did believe that God must have made the difference; now, I'm not so sure it wasn't just the force of my own determination to excel in a different area. Either way, my pride remained.
My pastor tried to advise me against Bible college. He suggested getting a bachelor's degree in some other field, then going to seminary. That way I would have a fall-back career if I needed to support myself, and I would get a higher-level ministry education. I figured school was mostly just a formality anyway--I could learn whatever I needed to, when I needed to--so I wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. Worrying about a fall-back career would just be a sign of weakness. At the same time, I did recognize something about my own tendencies. I was genuinely concerned that if I gave myself too much opportunity I might choose something more comfortable than ministry. But the advice he gave was wiser than I imagined at the time, and it was arrogant to write it off so quickly.
In college, my focus began to shift away from apologetics to the core areas I was studying--Bible and theology. No longer surrounded by unbelievers who needed to be convinced that Christianity was true or respectable, I got my thrills from arguing with classmates about mostly pointless theological controversies. I was attracted (even when I disagreed) to the most intellectual and controversial of professors, and when authority clashed with heresy, I chose the latter. Even so, I had absorbed the narrow focus of the fundamentalist college I was attending. I ended up going on to seminary after all, and I chose one that was comfortably similar in doctrine but intellectually more rigorous.
Even going to seminary was a last-minute decision. It was not my original plan, but as I neared the end of my undergraduate studies, I realized that I was too young for the kind of job I really wanted. Also, school was comfortable for me and held less uncertainty than ministry. Many of the same trends continued in seminary, as I gravitated toward the areas that would be most intellectually challenging, most obscure, most academic. Not surprisingly, I decided before I was done that I would rather teach than pursue pastoral ministry, which meant I would have to go on for a Ph.D. But there was a spiritual dimension to this shift that took me longer to recognize.
I don't think I ever really had much of a true devotional life. In youth group, I was expected to keep a journal of prayer and scriptural meditation. It was checked regularly for completeness, but not at a level that would distinguish real interaction with God from intellectual contemplation of the assigned passages and meticulous maintenance of prayer lists. From time to time, college and seminary classes also required me to keep some kind of devotional journal, and I would comply as necessary. But aside from that, I generally assumed that my school work was spiritual enough. Early on, I developed a methodology for what I was doing. If the goal was to know and serve God better, I needed to understand what he expected of me. To understand that, I needed to grasp biblical theology and praxis. To grasp that, I needed to read and analyze Scripture intelligently. To read and analyze, I needed to get as close to the original texts as I could. And so, my intellectual pursuits were organized around acquiring the tools I needed to do all of this for myself, not to rely on anyone else's conclusions. Assuming I was actually working toward that goal, it all should have added up to spiritual growth, without adding anything else to the mix.
In the same way that I had no real relationship with God, after marriage, I had no real relationship with my wife. Most of my time was devoted to school and work. Even when we were together in our apartment, we were usually doing different things. I did not concern myself with what she wanted or even needed, and I justified it all as a temporary condition that would stop when I was done with school. But school dragged on, and things didn't change.
I was required to serve in church during college and seminary, and so I did. I genuinely cared about doing well whatever I was given, and I honestly looked for ways to apply my abilities to the greatest use. But I don't think it was ever an expression of love for God or even for other people. It was preparation for my chosen career, and I naturally wanted to do it well. But eventually my intellectual pursuits began to outpace other aspects of my life. I sensed a widening gulf between what I thought and what I did. And I knew that there were limits to what I could say out loud or apply in real life. My eccentricity was accepted to a degree, but church life was insufficiently flexible to accommodate full disclosure. That's when I realized that I could not be in paid ministry, whether I wanted to or not, and I also realized that I wouldn't have much future teaching in the kind of schools I'd attended.
So by the time I started my Ph.D. program, I was back to looking at the secular arena for my career. I figured that if necessary a Ph.D. in Semitic languages could be applied in a seminary, but I was really interested in teaching in a secular or at least not-so-fundamentalist college or university, where no one would care exactly what I thought about conclusions, as long as I could teach the right methods. It would probably have been less costly in terms of time, money, energy, and relationships if I'd just decided to pursue a different career altogether. But I was trying to save face, to prove to myself and others that I had not wasted the past several years of my life on a career that I would never pursue.
The crux came when I finished coursework on my Ph.D. and simultaneously became a father. In my self-centered pursuit of academic goals, we had put off having kids as long as we could. But now I had more freedom with how I used my time and more motivation to get things right. I somehow sensed that real life was becoming considerably more important than academia, and I pushed school to the back burner, in favor of sorting out more practical issues like faith and politics. I was still self-centered, to be sure, but I think it was an important step to open up my closed, little world to the influences of reality. I concluded pretty readily that I could not continue down the same "spiritual" path--which, as I said, was never really all that spiritual in the first place. But now it was intellectually impossible, like trying to go back and watch a magic show after you've seen how the trick works. No force of will can make you believe again.
I had followed the path to its end and found that it didn't really lead anywhere. Moving forward would mean making my own path (and knowing it). The only option that retained hope was to back up and turn aside into something altogether different. But I had become so jaded that even this move felt like I was still deliberately charting my own course--like there was no God to be found at the end, only more disappointment. But I could hold out hope that I would never get far enough to find out. I began exploring other faith traditions, looking for something that I could "live with"--something I could respect as honest about itself as a tradition, and intellectually challenging enough to hold my interest. I hadn't really changed all that much--it was still about what would make me feel a certain way, and still without any expectation of a real encounter with a real God.
My first trial was characteristic. I explored Rabbinic Judaism mostly through reading, without opening up to anyone else about my interest. One significant change was that I was by this point pursuing something with a more spiritual dimension to it. So I spent a good deal of time trying out Jewish prayer. But I was still not prepared to follow any path of conversion that would require me to start over. Some things I could give up, but not my freedom to challenge the status quo.
I briefly considered Messianic Judaism as an alternative. It would not require a formal conversion, or a renunciation of anything in particular, and there was a better chance that my wife would go along with it. But it had too many of the same problems that had turned me off to Evangelicalism, in some cases to a greater degree. Ultimately, it was not a viable option, but this stage included some important turning points. One was that I finally opened up to my wife about what was going on. We were still miles apart on these things, but at least I was operating somewhat outside of my own head. Another was that it raised questions for me about early Christianity, which pointed me in the direction of Eastern Orthodoxy. It was a purely intellectual progression at the time, but I don't know how else I would have got there.
Eastern Orthodoxy was a viable candidate in terms of my search. It definitely had a deep sense of tradition and the potential to be very satisfying intellectually. Also, my Ph.D. work had provided me with some useful exposure to Orthodoxy, so that I not only had some sense of what it was and how to get more information, but I knew Eastern Orthodox people whom I could contact for help. But the real difference was the reality of the encounter. Yes, Orthodoxy responded to the questions I was asking; but it went far beyond that by both raising and answering the questions that I ought to have been asking but wasn't. It finally took me beyond what my own intellect could expect, to a real encounter with a real God. No, there were no heavenly visions, no physical symptoms. It was not even what I would have characterized at the time as a spiritual experience. But I was quietly carried along, until I realized after the fact just how far behind I'd left my initial pursuits.
Orthodoxy has plenty of room for intellectual exercise--that was never in question. But it also has centuries of experience ministering to the needs of the most common, illiterate peasant. It has an arsenal of very practical tools for the day-to-day spiritual life. So in addition to a lot of reading about a lot of different things, I was able to immerse myself in more practical matters of prayer, fasting, liturgy, and obedience. These disciplines did their work of softening my heart, to the point where I could accept the teachings of the Church not for their intellectual impressiveness, but implicitly as the faith of the saints. Most importantly, I was finally confronted with the depth of pride in my own life and how it had shaped my story.
One of the most perplexing and frustrating things for me about Orthodoxy was its lack of urgency. I had grown up on the standard appeal: "If you were to die today . . . " But here was a faith that welcomed this questioning seeker with a firm but gentle, "No." No, you may not convert right now. Seriously? Your wife is not with you. But what if I die before she changes her mind? If I had good reason to suspect you were going to die soon, that might change things, but since I don't--No.
So the first lesson of humility was accepting that some priest could tell me it wasn't time. The second was accepting that my own failures had a lot to do with the circumstances in our family. The third was realizing that there would be no quick fix. No, saying a prayer and writing down the date so I can remember when it happened won't do it. I have to wait for God's timing. But in the meantime, there was a fourth lesson--the long, slow process of repairing the damage--of becoming the person I should have been in the first place. And there's no guarantee attached to that either. I'm doing it because it's what I'm supposed to do--if I get there, all glory to God, whether my wife follows or not.
Along the way there have been encouraging moments--like when the priest finally did say "yes," after asking my wife, after she miraculously agreed, after she even allowed the kids to enter the Church with me. But we're still far from being on the same page. And I'm still far from being as humble as I should be. So every day I forget what I'm supposed to be learning. And every day God quietly reminds me. It won't be fixed by my intellect or my effort. And "fixed" won't even necessarily be what I think it should. It will only work out in his timing, according to his plan. I get that on some level, but I still have a long way to go. My Teacher is patient, and I know by that that he is not me.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
from The Promise, by Chaim Potok
There were three phones in Reb Saunders's house, all with the same number, one in Reb Saunders's study, one in the hall of the second-floor apartment where Danny's parents and Levi slept, one in the third-floor hall a few feet from Danny's room. The use of the phone on Shabbat is forbidden by Jewish law except in circumstances that constitute a clear emergency, and so the phones in that house almost never rang on Shabbat. On the rare occasions when they did ring they were ignored, because everyone assumed that the person at the other end had dialed a wrong number.
The phones in Reb Saunders's house began to ring at ten minutes past two that morning. Danny was immediately awake. He lay in bed in the darkness of his room and listened to the ringing of the phones echo through the house. After the seventh ring, the phones stopped. Then they started again. Danny was out of his bed and going down the stairs to the second floor when the phones stopped ringing the second time.
He found his father and brother in the hall of the second-floor apartment, both of them in robes and skull-caps. They were staring at the phone. Reb Saunders was about to say something to Danny when the phone started to ring again. He let it ring twice. Then he said to Danny in Yiddish, speaking over the noise of the ringing, "You think it is for you?"
Danny stared down at the phone and said nothing. He felt as if the sound of the phone were coming from somewhere inside himself.
"Who would ring at such an hour?" Levi asked in Yiddish. He held the robe tightly to his body as though he were cold.
"You think it is for you, Daniel?" Reb Saunders asked again.
"It's the wrong signal," Danny said. He had arranged an emergency telephone signal with the staff member on night duty: three rings, then stop, then ring again. That signal was to be used on Shabbat in case of an emergency with Michael. But the staff member did not know the treatment center administrator was calling Danny, and the administrator had no way of knowing the signal.
The phone stopped ringing. They stood there in the hall that had a single dim night light set in a wall socket, and waited. Almost immediately it began to ring again.
"It must be for you, Daniel," Reb Saunders said. "They are calling you."
Danny stared at the phone.
"Answer the phone, Daniel," Reb Saunders said.
Danny looked at his father.
"Answer," Reb Saunders said. "If it is a mistake, let the sin be on my head."
But Danny remained still. The phone continued to ring.
"Daniel," Levi said. "Our father tells you to answer the phone."
Danny lifted the phone and put it to his ear. He listened as the administrator, who of course knew of Danny's Orthodoxy, thanked him for answering and told him what was happening. Danny said if he did not call him back in five minutes it meant that he was on his way over, and hung up. He looked away from the phone and saw his father and his brother staring at him. Danny's face was white and he had to lean on the phone stand to steady himself.
"What is the matter?" Reb Saunders asked. "Daniel, what has happened? Levi, bring a glass of water. Daniel, tell me what is the matter."
Levi started out of the hall toward the kitchen, but Danny called him back. The three of them stood around the phone, Danny explaining, his father and brother listening. He spoke rapidly, in Yiddish. Had it been any other night of the week, he would have told them nothing. But this was Shabbat. He would be traveling on Shabbat. He had to tell them.
Reb Saunders listened until he understood enough to enable him to make a legal decision. Then he broke in on Danny's words. "Go!" he commanded. "Go quickly! Pickuach nefesh. Quickly! Quickly!"
"Take a taxi," Levi said urgently in Yiddish. "You will find one on Lee Avenue. And take money with you."
"Quickly!" Reb Saunders said again. "Quickly!"
Danny dressed and his father and brother accompanied him to the front door and he raced along his block beneath the naked sycamores and found a cab almost immediately on Lee Avenue. He told the driver it was an emergency. He was at the treatment center in less than half an hour.
The phones in Reb Saunders's house began to ring at ten minutes past two that morning. Danny was immediately awake. He lay in bed in the darkness of his room and listened to the ringing of the phones echo through the house. After the seventh ring, the phones stopped. Then they started again. Danny was out of his bed and going down the stairs to the second floor when the phones stopped ringing the second time.
He found his father and brother in the hall of the second-floor apartment, both of them in robes and skull-caps. They were staring at the phone. Reb Saunders was about to say something to Danny when the phone started to ring again. He let it ring twice. Then he said to Danny in Yiddish, speaking over the noise of the ringing, "You think it is for you?"
Danny stared down at the phone and said nothing. He felt as if the sound of the phone were coming from somewhere inside himself.
"Who would ring at such an hour?" Levi asked in Yiddish. He held the robe tightly to his body as though he were cold.
"You think it is for you, Daniel?" Reb Saunders asked again.
"It's the wrong signal," Danny said. He had arranged an emergency telephone signal with the staff member on night duty: three rings, then stop, then ring again. That signal was to be used on Shabbat in case of an emergency with Michael. But the staff member did not know the treatment center administrator was calling Danny, and the administrator had no way of knowing the signal.
The phone stopped ringing. They stood there in the hall that had a single dim night light set in a wall socket, and waited. Almost immediately it began to ring again.
"It must be for you, Daniel," Reb Saunders said. "They are calling you."
Danny stared at the phone.
"Answer the phone, Daniel," Reb Saunders said.
Danny looked at his father.
"Answer," Reb Saunders said. "If it is a mistake, let the sin be on my head."
But Danny remained still. The phone continued to ring.
"Daniel," Levi said. "Our father tells you to answer the phone."
Danny lifted the phone and put it to his ear. He listened as the administrator, who of course knew of Danny's Orthodoxy, thanked him for answering and told him what was happening. Danny said if he did not call him back in five minutes it meant that he was on his way over, and hung up. He looked away from the phone and saw his father and his brother staring at him. Danny's face was white and he had to lean on the phone stand to steady himself.
"What is the matter?" Reb Saunders asked. "Daniel, what has happened? Levi, bring a glass of water. Daniel, tell me what is the matter."
Levi started out of the hall toward the kitchen, but Danny called him back. The three of them stood around the phone, Danny explaining, his father and brother listening. He spoke rapidly, in Yiddish. Had it been any other night of the week, he would have told them nothing. But this was Shabbat. He would be traveling on Shabbat. He had to tell them.
Reb Saunders listened until he understood enough to enable him to make a legal decision. Then he broke in on Danny's words. "Go!" he commanded. "Go quickly! Pickuach nefesh. Quickly! Quickly!"
"Take a taxi," Levi said urgently in Yiddish. "You will find one on Lee Avenue. And take money with you."
"Quickly!" Reb Saunders said again. "Quickly!"
Danny dressed and his father and brother accompanied him to the front door and he raced along his block beneath the naked sycamores and found a cab almost immediately on Lee Avenue. He told the driver it was an emergency. He was at the treatment center in less than half an hour.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
celebrating St. John of Damascus
This coming weekend is a very full schedule, so I'm posting a bit early about Ian's nameday. So far, we haven't really done much to celebrate it. He was a bit young to get the point, and I wasn't sure how to make it stand out among the other festivities leading up to Christmas. (The reality of life, much as I would personally rather wait until Christmas actually gets here to start the celebration.) This year, he's working on his St. George medal for Cub Scouts, and one of the requirements in the book is to know about his patron saint and when his nameday is celebrated.So I figure we ought to do something; the question is, what? I mean, how do you celebrate a monastic scholar meaningfully for a six-year-old? Here's what I've come up with so far:
- Read the life of St. John. This one's pretty obvious, and since we'll be busy, we actually already did it last night.
- Let Ian pick the meal Thursday evening. I'm just starting him on fasting, so for this season he's only restricted on Wednesdays and Fridays. He'll be able to pick anything he wants, including eating out. In the future, it will be a fasting meal, but it can still be something nice.
- Listen to the eight funeral hymns. Not the most exciting stuff at his age, but I figure we can have it playing while we're doing something else.
- Draw a red line around his wrist. For his writing against iconoclasm, the emperor framed St. John and got the caliph to cut off his hand (among other penalties). John prayed, and the hand was restored, but he retained a red scar as a reminder of the miracle.
- Read some of St. John's hymns. Given the season, the second Nativity canon seems like a good choice. Also, Ian's been into poetry lately, so he might appreciate the poetic translations of selected hymns by John Mason Neale (1862).
- Try some icon writing. At this point, I think we'll call it good enough to color a preprinted icon for his St. George medal requirement. As he gets older, we might try something requiring a little more skill.
- Sing the troparion to St. John. Another no-brainer. We usually sing one to start off bedtime prayers anyway, and St. John has been in the rotation for quite a while.
- Pray before bed. There's an evening prayer, "O Master, Lover of mankind, is this bed to be my coffin . . . ," that's attributed to St. John. It would be good to incorporate it Thursday evening.
- Clean toilets. When St. John entered the monastery of St. Sava, he ended up with a very strict elder. He was supposed to do only what the elder told him to, but when one of the monks begged him to write for his deceased brother's funeral, he consented. His elder banished him, but was later persuaded to let him come back if he would fulfill a difficult task. The task was to clean all the chamber pots and latrines in the monastery with his bare hands. St. John completed it with joy and was restored. I don't know if I'll be able to get Ian excited about this one, but he might embrace it as something he's never done before. Plus, he's at that age where gross things are appealing, at least to talk about.
- Wear his skeleton shirt. I was looking back to see if I'd ever written anything about Ian's patron saint on my old blog and came across a post about his beloved skeleton. Now he has a skeleton shirt, which might be a good link to the hymn cited there.
- Give him icons as gifts. Since St. John is well-known for his defense of icons, this would be an especially good occasion to give Ian an icon.
- Write Christmas cards. St. John was framed for what he wrote against iconoclasm. He was charged with writing a letter to the emperor, conspiring against the caliph, for which his hand was cut off. When his hand was restored, the Theotokos exhorted him to continue writing. So I figure writing something by hand is a fitting way to honor his day. Since it is about that time anyway, writing Christmas cards would be a good way to do something useful.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
"Holy Scripture and the Church"
In its current issue, The Orthodox Word translates "Holy Scripture and the Church," by New Hieromartyr Hilarion, Archbishop of Verey. St Hilarion died in a Soviet gulag in 1929, but before the Revolution, he was Professor of Holy Scripture (New Testament) in the Moscow Theological Academy. Disillusionment with sola scriptura had a lot to do with my spiritual search that ended up in Orthodoxy, and I can't state the issues any better than he does here. (As an extra aid to my humility, he wrote almost a century ago, long before anyone cared about being post-modern.) It's best to read the whole article, but I'm including a few excerpts below.
. . . Furthermore, has the Church herself ever viewed her Founder [Christ] as one of the teachers of mankind? Has she ever considered His teachings as the essence of His work? No, with the utmost exertion of her theological strength, the Christian Church has defended as the greatest religious truth that Christ is the Only-begotten Son of God, One in essence with God the Father, Who became incarnate on earth. For that truth, the greatest Fathers of the Church labored to the point of blood. . . .
But was the Incarnation of the Only-begotten Son of God necessary only in order to write a book and entrust it to mankind? Was it absolutely essential for Him to be the Only-begotten Son of God just to write a book? If the Church insisted with such determination on the Divine dignity of her Founder, then obviously she did not regard writing to be the essence of His work. It was the Incarnation of the Son of God that was necessary for the salvation of mankind, and not a book. No book is able, nor could it ever have been able to save mankind. Christ is not the Teacher but precisely the Savior of mankind. . . .
Christ founded the Church. The Church existed even when there was not yet a single book of New Testament Scripture. . . . Thus, it would not be impertinent to say that it is not by Holy Scripture, as a book, that man is saved, but by the grace of the Holy Spirit, Who lives in the Church. The Church guides people to perfection. In the Church there are also other ways, other means to that effect, besides the books of Holy Scripture. . . .
It is possible to know the entire New Testament by heart, it is possible to know perfectly the entire teaching of the New Testament, and still be very, very far from salvation. For salvation it is necessary to be added to the Church, just as it is said in the Book of Acts that those who were being saved were added to the Church (cf. Acts 2:47; 5:13-14). This was when there were no Scriptures, but there was the Church, and there were those who were being saved. Why was it essential to be added to the Church? It is because special grace-bearing power is needed for salvation, and this power can only be possessed by those who participate in the life of the Church, in the life of the single and indivisible Body of Christ. The grace-filled power of the Holy Spirit acts in the Church in many different ways: in the Mysteries and rites of the Church, in common prayer and mutual love, in church services; and, as the divinely inspired Word of God, it also operates through the books of Holy Scripture. . . .
Thus, Holy Scripture is one of the manifestations of the common grace-filled life of the Church. Holy Scripture is the property of the Church, precious and priceless, but precisely the Church's property. Holy Scripture cannot be torn away from the overall life of the Church. Only the Church gives meaning to the existence of Scripture. . . .
Here St. John Chrysostom defends the necessity of studying Holy Scripture, but at the same time he says that if things were the way they should be, we would not need Holy Scripture; that with a pure life, instead of books, grace would serve the soul, and that this path of spiritual enlightenment is higher. God spoke with the patriarchs and the apostles without the assistance of Scripture. The need for Holy Scripture arose when some turned aside from true doctrine and others from purity of life. Scripture is then a second remedy. We even deserve reproach for being in need of Scripture. . . .
Perhaps the saddest thing in our times is the distortion of Christ and the Church. Christianity is seen not as the new life of saved humanity, united in the Church, but as the sum of certain theoretical and moral positions. They have begun now to talk too much and too often about Christian teachings and have begun to forget about Church life. . . .
If we have before us a teacher, then every word of his, every literary text in which his teaching is reflected in any way, must be accorded special significance. Something similar has happened with Holy Scripture. It was accorded special significance in itself and independently of the Church when the bright ideal of the Church grew dim. Holy Scripture has become the object of special attention and many-sided study since the time of the German Reformation, when the individual person was put in place of the Church and the door to rationalism was opened wide, thus deadening any authentic Church life. . . . Having lost the living Christ and authentic Church life, the Protestants began worshiping the book of the New Testament as if it were some sort of fetish. Go into a Protestant church of the extreme Protestant sects, and you will see rows of pews facing a pulpit with a Bible on it. In short, if you take the icon away from any classroom or auditorium, what you have is a Protestant church. For the Protestants it is as if the Gospel were the work of Christ the Teacher, which has to be studied in order to be a Christian. Thus, Protestantism tries to replace the entire deep river of grace-filled Church life with but a single current, taken separately and in isolation. Having rebelled against the pope (a man), the Protestants have made the Bible into a "paper pope," and the latter adulation is more bitter than the first.
. . . If the grace-filled aspect of Holy Scripture is obliterated outside the Church, then what remains? We are left with the Bible, books, a literary work, a literary memorial. In the Church Holy Scripture is not everything, but outside the Church there is no Holy Scripture, no Word of God at all; what remains of Holy Scripture is only the books. . . .
In defining the essence of Holy Scripture, we can now formulate the following proposition:
Holy Scripture is one of the aspects of the common grace-filled life of the Church, and outside the Church there cannot be any Holy Scripture in the true sense of the word. . . .
By living and being instructed within the Church, within which the Apostolic oral preaching is continued, a person is able to learn the dogmas of Christian Faith from the Ecumenical Church, and this is so not because the Church herself draws her dogmas from Scripture, but because she possesses them innately; if she, deliberating on a certain dogma, cites specific passages from the Bible, this is not done in order to deduce her dogmas, but solely for their confirmation. Therefore, whoever founds his faith upon Scripture alone, does not achieve the fullness of Faith and does not know its properties.
In complete accordance with this authoritative statement, we can reduce everything to faith in the Church. If a man believes in the Church, then for him the Holy Scripture receives its proper significance.
. . . Living within the Church means, first of all, to love, to live by love; and to live by love means to struggle against sinful self-love, from which people suffer a great deal. In particular, faith in the Church is a podvig [an ascetic feat, spiritual labor or, simply, Christian struggle] for the mind, because the Church demands its submission. To make one's reason submit to the Church is especially difficult, because this submission unfailingly affects one's whole life. With regard to the Church, the podvig of the mind is connected with the podvig of the will. Imagine for a moment that people completely submit to the Church. How many idols, how many gods and graven images must they cast down? Not only the Dnieper, but an entire sea would be needed to sink all those idols. And yet, not even one podvig of the mind comes easily to a man whose reason makes him proud. Bishop Theophan the Recluse says: "It is remarkable how Wisdom calls to herself the foolish: Whoso is foolish, let him turn aside to me (Prov. 9:4). Accordingly, the clever are barred from entering into the House of Wisdom, or the Holy Church. One must lay aside every kind of cleverness at the very entrance of this House. On the other hand, if all wisdom and knowledge are to be found within the House of Wisdom, then outside this House, outside the Holy Church, only foolishness, ignorance and blindness prevail. How wondrous is that which God has established! When you enter the Church, put aside your own mind, and you will become truly wise; cast away your self-centered activity, and you will become truly active; renounce your own self, and you will truly become master over yourself. Ah, if only the world could grasp this wisdom! But this is hidden from it. . . . "
The necessity of a Church approach to Scripture is revealed with particular clarity if we thoroughly examine the extreme lie inscribed on the banner of Protestantism, and then look at every kind of sectarianism and, generally speaking, human light-mindedness, in addition to freethinking, which is indissolubly connected to the latter. In principle Protestantism has rejected the necessity of Church standards in interpreting Scripture. I say "in principle," since in actual fact standards have been invented in the form of newly fabricated sectarian creeds. If Church standards are rejected, then man is left alone with Scripture, and in interpreting Scripture, each one is to be guided by his own so-called common sense, having put on his head beforehand the tiara of an infallible pope. . . .
Leave a man alone with Scripture, and Scripture loses any definite meaning and significance. There remains only one man, the whims and oddities of whose mind will be concealed by the authority of the Word of God. Without the Church and outside of the Church, he is inevitably in a state of hopeless wandering, even if he has in his hands the book of Holy Scripture. . . .
St. Irenaeus of Lyons calls Scripture the Tree of Paradise planted in the midst of the Church. For those expelled from Paradise, however, this tree can only be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; and after partaking of it, they can be convinced only of the sad truth that they are naked. It is high time for all opponents of the Church to be persuaded of their shameful nakedness and ask the Church's forgiveness, just as the prodigal son asked his father's forgiveness! The absurd separation of Scripture from the Church has already produced its lethal fruit. . . .
Thus, the truth of the indissoluble bond between the Church and Holy Scripture is also affirmed in a negative way. A relationship with Scripture from outside the Church inevitably leads to absurdity and loss of Holy Scripture itself.
Without the Church, first of all, there is no undergirding whatsoever for the interpretation of Holy Scripture; it is not Scripture that teaches man, but on the contrary, man foists upon Scripture whatever content he desires.
Without the Church, secondly, every definite way to Christ and His teaching is lost, since Christ Himself never wrote anything and the Apostles can be suspected of inaccurately transmitting the teaching of Christ.
Without the Church, thirdly, the canon of Holy Books does not have any significance whatsoever, and all Protestants and sectarians faced with the question of why precisely these books are canonical can only be left with no answer or forced to restort to shameful words of craftiness, words of evil (Ps. 140:4). . . .
The truth we have sought to substantiate is not new, but it should be reiterated in the twentieth [!] century, because although it has been repeatedly verified by history, it is now quite often forgotten.
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