This “Fathers Day” in the USA also happens to be the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council in the Orthodox Church. That was the Council that dealt with Arianism, the heresy of Arius, who taught that Christ was a creature — very special and exalted, but a creature nonetheless.
That council responded that Christ was “very God of very God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father,” words of the Nicene Creed, so called because that Council met at Nicea.
Theological definitions
Theological definitions were declared only reluctantly by the Church, only if absolutely necessary, and only to the extent necessary to oppose specific heresies.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.
Such was the practice of the early church, before the Great Schism. It’s still that way in Orthodoxy, although the whole story now is a bit more complicated. An Orthodox cyberfriend summarized it: If it weren’t for heretics, we would have no theology.
Reminiscenses
The Red Shoes
There are many versions of The Red Shoes, but it basically tells of a young girl without much money who is entranced by a pair of red shoes she sees a princess wearing. They are so different to the heavy black shoes that everyone tramps in and out of church with. They all seem so serious, so weighed down. Through various kindnesses she gets a similar pair of red shoes.
One day outside the church she meets a man returning from a great war, far away. He has a long white beard and very bright eyes. He starts to play a fiddle. While others disapprove, he coos and simpers over the girl’s shoes, even asking her to give him a little twirl, a little dance. Feeling shamed by the churchgoers and affirmed by his gaze, she starts to dance. For a while it’s quite wonderful, even liberating. She twirls past the villagers, round the graves, laughing and in wild excitement. She hollers and pirouettes, all the time with the old man playing his fiddle and making her feel seen. For a few minutes this is quite the spectacle, but after a while, the crowd grow bored, gather their kids and go home for Sunday dinner.
Point made, the laughing girl tries to stop dancing and finds she can’t. As the panic grows in her eyes, this excites the old man even more. He starts to play faster and leads her out of the graveyard and onto the moors and through the woods. For many hours she splashes through streams and over hills, growing more and more crazed, more exhausted. Under a full moon she spasms and twists as the fiddling man keeps pace. The ecstasy has descended into nightmare, the passion into enchantment. Her feet are bleeding and somehow twined to the shoes.
Finally she dances into the arms of an angel who frees her from the ghastly parade and liberates her feet. The old man melts away into the trees. The angel washes her feet in a stream and over time she recovers. She is never going to wear those big heavy black shoes of the others, but she finds gentler, sweeter rhythms to move to. When she wants to stop, she simply sits down and takes her handmade shoes off.
…
In more brutal versions of the story, the girl meets not an angel but villagers, who, at her prompting, cut her feet off to stop the dance. She is now crippled but safe, being wheeled in and out of church for the rest of her life, chastened but wiser.
Martin Shaw, On Sex: Dancing With The Passions
Martin Shaw is a storyteller, but he upacks this story, with two of its alternate endings, nicely for the hard of hearing, including:
This grotesque scenario just exaggerates further the juxtaposition of rabid licentiousness and morbid ideas of purity. There is a distinct lack of imagination in both forms of acting out.
I’d never heard this story until last Sunday. Today’s blog is so full (too full?) of personal reminiscences that I’ve deleted an awkward one here.
The Refrigerium
Did ye never hear of the Refrigerium? A man with your advantages might have read of it in Prudentius, not to mention Jeremy Taylor.
The name is familiar, Sir, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what it means.
It means that the damned have holidays—excursions, ye understand.
Excursions to this country?
For those that will take them. Of course most of the silly creatures don’t. They prefer taking trips back to Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership of some house that once belonged to them: and then ye get what’s called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their children. Or literary ghosts hang about public libraries to see if anyone’s still reading their books.
This forgotten passage from C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce popped up recently.
The Great Divorce is one of the most important books in my spiritual biography. There’s not a single word of explicit theology that I remember, but the tacit theology that struck me — that one might, by indulging habitual sins (including distortions of things like the maternal instinct, or pride), make his soul unfit for heaven and even repelled by it — shook me out of a dangerous rut. Since I didn’t think that God would hold an unwilling soul hostage in heaven, just because he’d once said “the sinner’s prayer” in a fit of pious enthusiasm, I in due course left Calvinism (which suggested something like that) for Orthodox Christianity (which decidedly does not).
(That’s not the whole story. There have been 26 or 27 intervening years as I’ve lived an active corporate life in Orthodoxy, and my thinking doesn’t exactly run along those lines any more. But an effort to put the change into words has failed me.)
Proto-exvangelical
When I left evangelicalism, it certainly was not because I was disillusioned with the faith of my early childhood. I have sweet (if somewhat nutty) memories of all those days … I think my problem with remaining an evangelical centered on what the evangelical community became. It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American Christianity, the sheer stupidity, the paranoia of the American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture, all of it . . . that made me crazy. It was just too stupid for words.
Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God
I do not recommend books by Frank Schaeffer, but I read them “back in the day” for reasons not worth going into again. This quote popped up recently and seemed on point to some other things I’ve been thinking about.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how much Evangelicalism has changed since my youth. It really shouldn’t have surprised me; Evangelicalism is built on shifting sands, because the Bible they claim (or claimed in Evangelicalism1967) as their sole authority is easily twisted and manipulated.
The nondenominational Evangelical/Charismatic/Clericalist syncretism described in this piece would have been recognized, back in my Evangelical days, as cultic and outside Evangelical boundaries. Apparently it’s not so recognized any longer, but some people, God bless ‘em, become “exvangelical” by abandoning it.
IVCF & CCC
… on many campuses the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship flourished and became a locus for evangelical dissent. Founded in Britain and rooted in the tolerant English evangelical tradition, the ministry emphasized fellowship and religious studies. It published books, encouraged critical thinking, and gave students leave to raise the issues of their generation, such as racism and the Vietnam War.
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals.
I was an IVCF kind of Christian, not a Campus Crusade for Christ (now “Cru”) kind of Christian, I found when I left Evangelical hothouses and entered a secular university. (Navigators wasn’t much of a thing on my campus.) Now a great chasm lies between me and both, as both are Western and Protestant, but I can say with some confidence that IVCF prepared me in many ways for Orthodoxy, and I still feel kindly toward it.
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 