We are not alone
Paradise is closed (vs. 3:24) but God never forsakes mankind, providing us with a means of survival through birth, growth, and human labor (vs. 4:2). He exposes sin in all its vicious ugliness and deadliness – and yet, to prevent despair, God also discloses that His image remains within us. Despite sin, the grace of God abounds.
Dynamis devotional for March 2, reflecting on Genesis 3:21-4:7.
I mention this to contradict the (prevalent? After learning that dispensationalism is waning, I realize I’ve lost touch with America’s religious notions) idea that God cursed Adam, Eve and their descendants because of sin. It’s not humans God curses. You can look that up.
God does not withdraw His blessing from us despite our expulsion from Paradise, nor on account of our sinfulness and the consequent distortion of God’s likeness within us. We hear of God’s continuing love for us “while we were still sinners” (Rom 5:8) in this morning prayer to the Holy Trinity: “Because of the abundance of Thy goodness and long suffering, Thou was not wroth with us, slothful and sinful as we are; neither hast Thou destroyed us in our transgressions, but in Thy compassion raised us up as we lay in despair, that at dawn we might sing the glories of Thy Majesty.”
Dynamis devotional for 3/5/26.
Returning from Schism
I had quite lost track of this gem-of-a-blog:
I have come to see that the biggest difference of all—and for some the biggest hurdle to true interior conversion—was our different understandings of the Church itself.
Orthodoxy’s ecclesiology is dramatically different from that of everyone … in the Protestant world, and unless this difference is understood and embraced, conversions will be incomplete and half-baked at best. It is important, in other words, that the former erroneous ecclesiology of Protestant converts be decisively dismantled. If it is left intact the door of apostasy from Orthodoxy may be left invitingly ajar.
What is this erroneous ecclesiology? In a word Protestantism regards “the Church” as the conglomeration of all Trinitarian denominations.
…
Given the problems afflicting the western church in the medieval period following its schism from the Orthodox east, one understands the insistence of the Protestant Reformers that separation from the papal west was imperative. The early Reformers regarded the Pope as the eschatological Antichrist, and this could not help but make schism from the papal church an urgent necessity. Nonetheless the ultimate result was the acceptance of schism as a defining feature of the Protestant churches. That is, schism from the papal church was accepted as normal and necessary, for the papal church (they thought) was not the true Church, but Babylon the Great, the Mother of harlots and the abominations of the earth (Revelation 17:5). For them the choice seemed to be either schism or apostasy.
Protestantism thus gradually came to lose the primitive Christian horror of schism.
What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the una sancta.
…
Orthodoxy regards the Protestant denominations (and, come to that, our Roman Catholic friends as well) as in schism from the one, united, and indivisible Church. The root ecumenical problem therefore is not simply difference of doctrine, but schism. The Orthodox believe that they are the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church confessed in the Creed. Converts to Orthodoxy are not only invited to agree with its teaching, but to join its family. In converting to Orthodoxy they are not simply joining a different denomination, but returning from schism.
Fr. Lawrence Farley, The Necessary Revolution.
(Yes, this means among other things that I detest the insouciant journalistic trope, when dealing with church history, that the Orthodox Church broke from the Roman Catholic Church.)
Liturgies of the Wild
(I finished Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild this week. At the request of a “friend” on my social medium, I summarized it and now share that with you. Nobody ever taught me how to write a proper book review, and this is a book that evokes as much or more than it tutors, so I hope I achieved an evocative portrait of a book full of evocation, if not a book review proper).
Shaw was raised as a Baptist in Great Britain, but wandered off and had no institutional or ideational connection to any kind of Christianity. He was converted/reverted roughly five years ago, ending up Eastern Orthodox.
There’s a fair amount in the book about his “reversion” (my word, not his) but very little about the distinctly Orthodox shape it took. To my relief, there’s no effort to tutor the reader in Christian doctrine:
After a few months he offers some advice: Stop reading for a bit. Orthodoxy is first for the body not the intellect. That’ll come quite naturally. Stay focused on the Encounter, not the theology. Stay focused on the Presence not the history. There’s nothing wrong with study, but don’t rush there too quickly.
Instead:
This is a book that rescues lost stories. Many come from the fairy-tale and mythic traditions of the world, relegated these last hundred years to children’s books or a therapist’s couch.
Shaw rescues those lost stories under 13 rubrics, each a chapter:
- On Thrownaway Stories
- On Bones
- On Initiation.
- On Death.
- On Passivity.
- On Passion.
- On Prayer.
- On Guilt.
- On Envy
- On Dream.
- On Limit.
- On Evil.
- On Praise Making.
Then an epilogue: On the Ancient Good.
I can’t say I have “effable” takeaways because that doesn’t seem to be how stories and myths work:
It’s no good to go chasing after meaning as an abstraction; meaning comes in the doing of things … There are robbers stealing the horses of your imagination: Kick them out. This book has been full of hints as to how to do that. If I’m too explicit you will be left with a pamphlet not a story.
But I’m glad to have read it, and I think it’s the kind of book I may reread periodically, especially because we have thrown away so many stories and it’s not an easy job to get them back in a way that’s integral to our gut-level worldview.
Tradition
Protestant: Tradition X is wrong because nobody even mentions it until the Nth century.
Orthodox: How do you know that? Don’t you mean that we have no surviving written records of Tradition X until the Nth Century? That’s not the same thing, y’know.
Just sayin’.
Religion
If you pick up a translation of almost any ancient text of appreciable length, chances are you will find the term “religion” somewhere in the translation. There is also no shortage of books on the topic of this or that “ancient religion.” It is no wonder, then, that many people have the impression that the modern notion of religion is present in our ancient sources.
Brent Nongbri, Before Religion
Orthocardia
Put simply, if the primary American divide is between right and left, then [Texas Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James] Talarico isn’t that interesting. There’s a long history of progressive religious activism in the United States, just as there is a long history of conservative religious activism. White evangelicals might be overwhelmingly Republican, but American Christians are remarkably diverse politically, and we’ve been arguing with one another for a long time.
Yet if the primary American divide is between decent and indecent, then the equation changes. Talarico shines.
Or, to put it another way, Talarico is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian, and by acting like a Christian he reveals a profound contrast with so many members of the MAGA Christian movement that’s dominated American political life for 10 years.
…
It does really matter whether a politician is pro-life or pro-choice, but there is no spiritual or political scenario where you can abandon Christian virtue for the sake of the alleged greater good, and if a Christian politician abandons Christian virtue, then Christian believers should abandon him or her.
David French, James Talarico Is a Christian X-Ray (shared link because there’s a lot more stuff worth considering)
Ontology, not morality
The beatitudes have a single purpose, to help humans on their path to theosis. They are not about humanly conceived morality or about behaving properly. They have a deeper, ontological meaning.
Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence (hyperlink added).
This evokes one of my favorite aphorisms from Fr. Stephen Freeman: Christ did not come to make bad men good but to make dead men live.
Postscript
[W]e … live in a democratized world. We challenge walls of every sort and shout approvingly whenever they come tumbling down. In a strange manner of speaking, democracy is the maximization of narcissism. Where there are no walls, everything is me and mine.
As the current national government explicitly exults in its “strength,” “force,” and “power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 