A chorus cries out
“All the prophets have from the beginning cried out to my soul, imploring her to make herself a virgin and prepare herself to receive the Divine Son into her immaculate womb;
Imploring her to become a ladder, down which God will descend into the world, and up which man will ascend to God.
Imploring her to drain the red sea of sanguinary passions within herself, so that man the slave can cross over to the promised land, the land of freedom.
The wise man of China admonishes my soul to be peaceful and still, and to wait for Tao to act within her. Glory be the memory of Lao-tse, the teacher and prophet of his people!
The wise man of India teaches my soul not to be afraid of suffering, but through the arduous and relentless drilling in purification and prayer to elevate herself to the One on high, who will come out to greet her and manifest to her His face and His power. Glorious be the memory of Krishna, the teacher and prophet of his people!
The royal son of India teaches my soul to empty herself completely of every seed and crop of the world, to abandon all the serpentine allurements of frail and shadowy matter, and then–in vacuity, tranquility, purity and bliss–to await nirvana. Blessed be the memory of Buddha, the royal son and inexorable teacher of his people!
The thunderous wise man of Persia tells my soul that there is nothing in the world except light and darkness, and that the soul must break free from the darkness as the day does from the night. For the sons of light are conceived from the light, and the sons of darkness are conceived from darkness. Glorious be the memory of Zoroaster, the great prophet of his people!
The prophet of Israel cries out to my soul: Behold, the virgin will conceive and bear a son, whose name will be — the God~man. Glorious be the memory of Isaiah, the clairvoyant prophet of my soul!
O heavenly Lord, open the hearing of my soul, lest she become deaf to the counsels of Your messenger.“
Saint Nikolai Velimirovic in his Prayers by the Lake, via Steve Robinson.
A horrible scandal and its roots
After I moved back to East Texas from college, my sister’s husband invited me to hear their “new preacher,” which was always their evangelical hook—”Wait till you hear our new preacher!” Cornered, without an excuse at the ready, I accompanied them one night to their revival. It was a stem-winder lesson on the “End Times,” the “Rapture,” and the assorted framework of beliefs that held that construction together. This was a long time ago, so long ago that it was back when he was still speaking to me. I think I must have been twenty-two years old at the time, and the sermon was certainly effective, just not in the way he expected it to be. The Baptist church was everything I remembered it to be, and I have, except for the occasional funeral or wedding, never been back.
Instead, I joined up with the Restorationist church of my dad’s people, at least on his mother’s side. I met my wife there and spent a little over twenty-five years with them. We claimed not to be nondenominational, but rather _un_denominational. This was believed to be true because: 1) our hermeneutic was the correct one; 2) we “went just by the Bible,” and of course, nobody in Protestant history had ever thought of that before; and 3) we said so. I never bought into this foundational underpinning, but largely kept my mouth shut as long as I could. In my observation, we still quacked and waddled just like the other waterfowl in the Protestant pond. But I will have to hand it to my old church: we were decidedly not Pre-millennial. Charles Darby meant nothing to us. We avoided Scofield Reference Bibles. The words “rapture,” and “Great Tribulation,” and “Thousand-year reign,” were not in our vocabulary.
…
The Orthodox Church has a 2,000 year old stake in the [Middle East]. The people who suffer under the yoke of Zionist policy–Palestinian Arabs–can just as easily be Orthodox (or Catholic) Christians as Muslims. True, the percentages are small, and due to the persecution, continuing to shrink. But when Israelis look at them, they do not see a Christian, but rather a Palestinian. I have always been amazed that American Christian Zionism is such a one-way street: it is all about Evangelicals bending over backwards to accommodate the Israeli state, whereas there is no reciprocal behavior on their part towards Christians.
Terry and I are cyber-friends of what seems like more than a decade now. I quote the first two paragraphs because they’re roughly parallel to my experience over my lifetime, the last because indifference to Christians in the Middle East, especially if Israel is in the mix, is a horrible scandal, rooted in the prophecy-porn devolution of dispensationalist heresy, for which scandal (and heresy) evangelicals must one day give an account.
Truth about the End Times
Orthodox Holy Tradition says clearly that the Second Coming, the General Resurrection, and the Last Judgment are three facets of one single, overwhelming event. There is no divide (which is the meaning of the heresy of chiliasm, which was rejected in the Second Ecumenical Council, and the reason why we say “and His Kingdom shall have no end” in the Creed). There is no Rapture. There is no Seven Year Tribulation. There is no single human individual who is the Antichrist or the Beast — the Antichrist is not a Jew, not a Muslim, not a Communist, nor is he the Pope or any one of the many theories that have been published over the centuries.
There is no literal thousand-year-long Millennium. There is no reappearance of Satan setting off the last Armageddon.
There will indeed come the Great Universal Transfiguration that overwhelms time and space and all Creation.
This is the Kingdom i[n] its infinite, almost terrifying fullness and glory.
Fr. Jonathan Tobias, The Last Judgment and the Problem of Goathood
Throwing down the gauntlet
[A]t the outset I will state:
- The Bible is not the Christian Holy Book.
- Christians (and Jews) are not People of the Book.
- Submission to God is not a proper way to describe the Christian faith.
Further, any and all of these claims, once accepted, lead to fundamental distortions of Christianity. An extreme way of saying this is that much of modern Christianity has been “Islamified.” Thinking critically about this is important – particularly in an era of renewed contact with Islam.
Fr. Stephen Freeman, Has Your Bible Become A Quran?
If you’re so godly, why ain’t you rich?
I frequently think about our technical prowess and material prosperity in The Thing That Used to Be Western Christendom, in contrast to Eastern Christendom.
The west has developed technically in direct relationship to the decline of the Christian consciousness, for the simple reason that the “secularization“ of nature that permits it to be regarded as an object and so to be exploited technically, is in direct contradiction to the sacramental spirit of Christianity, wherever and whenever this is properly understood, as it was at least to some extent in the medieval world.
Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 