All Souls, 2026

This is not a day when the Orthodox Church remembers all saints, but I thought a reminder that Halloween is the eve of All Saints Day in the Latin Christian world would be timely.

What is Church for?

In the vast, overwhelming majority of places around the Western world that refer to themselves as a “Christian church,” the men and women who lead these assemblies frame themselves primarily as weekly teachers.

The pastor is expected to spend the week:

Studying Scripture.
Communicating various theological concepts.
Providing practical applications in their sermon for their congregants to take to heart.
Addressing various contemporary cultural and political issues of the day.
Delivering a stirring message that will leave congregants feeling like they “got something from the message.”

…

An Orthodox priest’s primary job is not to deliver a homily every week that ministers theology, inspiration, and a type of motivational message to his congregation that will stir the congregants to come back again week after week.

The two different traditions, Orthodox Christianity and modern Evangelical Protestantism, exist side by side with two entirely different assumptions:

The Sunday Divine Liturgy is not a lecture.
The priest is a spiritual father, not a professor.
Discipleship is experiential, not something I simply receive by way of a message.

…

If there is anything that I see differently than I did when I was a young man, it is this: being a Christian is primarily not about the theological information I learn; it is about learning to confess my sins before God and clothe myself in humility.

When I was a young man, I viewed my relationship with Jesus Christ primarily as one in which I amassed knowledge about God, the Bible, theology, etc.

However, the longer I am in the Orthodox Church, the more I begin to realize that a relationship with God begins and ends with humility.

Kenneth B., The 14-Hour Sermon: Have We Forgotten What Church is For? He wrote it, but I’ve experienced the same thing.

How are we to live in an AI Age?

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

C.S. Lewis via Martin Shaw

Wild and wasted virtues

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

G.K. Chesterton via Fr. Stephen Freeman, Hope: The Unashamed Virtue

Enabling lies, activating lies

The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We’ll call them the enabling lies and the activating lies. And unless you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will constantly pollute the body politic and continue to spawn violent unrest.

What’s the difference between the two kinds of lies? The enabling lie is the lie that makes you fertile ground for the activating lie that actually motivates a person to charge a thin blue line at the Capitol or take a rifle to a pizza parlor.

Here’s an enabling lie: America will end if Trump loses. That was the essence of the Flight 93 essay in 2016. That was the core of Eric Metaxas’s argument in our debates this spring and fall.

Here’s another enabling lie: The fate of the church is at stake if Joe Biden wins.

And here’s yet another: The left hates you (this sentence sometimes concludes with the phrase “and wants you dead.”)

I could go on, but the enabling lies that have rocketed through the church for years share important characteristics. They not only dramatically exaggerate the stakes of our political and legal disputes, they dramatically exaggerate the perfidy of your opponents. Moreover, when the stakes are deemed to be that high, the moral limitations on your response start to fall away.

David French

This may look political, but that’s not my intent. Believing those enabling lies corrodes your soul. Refusing to dwell on them is a matter of spiritual health.

Nice Summary

Their job is to be silent in a world that doesn’t stop talking.

Catherine Bauer, Director of Development and Marketing for the Carmelite Sisters of Fairfield, an Order that is building a stone monastery in Pennsylvania with a vision of it lasting a thousand years.

Not four bare walls and a lectern

… I had this kind of Protestant idea that one should beware of beauty ….

Dr. David Bradshaw in his account of why he became Orthodox

Beautiful church buildings respect the mysteries that occur within, chiefly the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. If we have a high view of the Eucharist, then just as we will want to use a beautiful chalice to show respect to Christ’s sacrifice, we will also want to have a beautiful temple in which these sacred mysteries occur. By contrast, a low view of the Eucharist often finds expression in church buildings that proclaim a type of architectural Docetism: God is everywhere generally but nowhere in particular.

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics

Scholasticism

The more I studied, the more I saw the Scholastic tradition as an effort to cling to the god of the philosophers while somehow saying of God that which Christians know they must.

Nathan Jacobs, My Wild Ride to Orthodoxy (around the 21 minute mark)

I have just discovered Nathan Jacobs and I’m pretty enthusiastic about it.

The Crusades

The Crusades, for instance, could not have taken place in a world in which the principles of the Christian religion were fully understood: from the Christian point of view, the ‘events’ of Christ’s life are repeated wherever and whenever members of the Church participate in the Mysteries, and the notion that it was important to ‘liberate’ one particular place where they had occurred in one particular time could only have developed to the extent it did as a consequence of extraneous, or what one might call superstitious, influences.

Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West

The Christian East did not participate in the Crusades, and in fact suffered particularly in 1205 A.D. from rampaging Crusaders. Some historians of Christianity mark that as the point beyond which the Great Schism of 1054, when the Pope severed the West from the rest of the Church, became permanent.

Really?!

Even though Pope Leo XIV is recovering well from lung cancer surgery and is going ahead with a big trip to Latin America next week, the diagnosis is “a bit of a game-changer” for the Vatican and Leo’s still-young papacy, a top Vatican official said Tuesday.

Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Holy See’s foreign minister, said there had been a temptation to think that Leo was a “Superman, a Superpope” after he was elected in 2025 and “hit the ground running” following the drawn-out illness and death of Pope Francis.

“The fact that he has fallen ill with, in many ways, one of the most common illnesses of our age means that he is a poor mortal like the rest of us. And I think that that is going to change how we see him and possibly how he sees himself as well,” Gallagher told reporters at the Italian foreign press association.

Top Vatican official says pope’s cancer diagnosis a ‘game-changer’ for the papacy (emphasis added).

Is Abp. Gallagher a Protestant mole or something? Why would he think that Catholics, and the Pope himself, had such idiotic ideas?

My antidote to beating dead horses

Having left the Protestant religious world finally and officially 29 years ago this month, I nevertheless remain interested in its goings-on — sometimes horrified, sometimes filled with schadenfreude, occasionally pleasantly surprised — because America is deeply Protestant and I cannot entirely escape that fact short of getting me to an Orthodox monastery and forever eschewing news and political involvement.

But I’ve become increasingly aware that, in David Foster Wallace terms, because Protestantism is not the water I deliberately swim in, there not only are things about it that I’m better equipped to see than those in it but also important currents I’m oblivious to.

My version of Protestantism has scarcely been updated since 1997 and a lot of my version is shaped by my experiences in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was caught in a backwater of Wheaton-style evangelicalism — a strongly dispensationalist milieu adjacent to a broader mainstream. So I’m still beating a dispensational premillennialist horse, though I see glimpses that it’s virtually dead.

That evangelical fads of my youth should be gone by my dotage, replaced by other fads, is a proof, I think, that Protestantism in general and Evangelicalism in particular are built on shifting sands, not solid rock, despite the gospel song to the contrary (which probably nobody under 50 even knows these days).

But mocking or gently critiquing the fads of my youth doesn’t do much good for people living today. So I’m updating my understanding of Protestantism through reading The Protestant Mind, a blog-like project of First Things with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

In this epoch when “Evangelical” is almost synonymous with “MAGA” in the popular press, The Protestant Mind’s principal author, Dale Coulter, helpfully provides a taxonomy of the Christian Right in America 2026 (“The Two Evangelical Rights”). The major rubrics are New Protestant Right” and “new evangelical populism.”

It helped me clarify a lot. I was tempted to speculate about which one I’d likely be in were I still Protestant, but that’s just a counterfactual too far.

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

The Gospel for People battered by bad religion

A tonsured Reader in the Orthodox Church (i.e., the lowest Order of Clergy), I have from time to time been called on to lead a Sunday morning service in the absence of a Priest or Deacon.

Yesterday, our Priest had to travel to our Diocesan Sobor, being held today and tomorrow. Since we are one of the parishes in the hinterlands, a full-day drive from the Cathedral, he needed to travel during our normal Sunday worship time, so I was called into service once more.

Father asked me to deliver a homily on the Gospel. A Reader cannot roll his own sermons, though. We settled on a homily given by St. Nicolai Velimirovich, a Serbian-born saint who reposed in Pennsylvania in 1956, a refugee from his homeland.

The sermon was ten pages on the parable of the sower and the seed, Luke 8:5-15, and it was dense as well as long, so I had to trim it down. I decided to skip over his description of the wayside, and the rocks, and to focus instead, in USA 2026, on the thorns, which Christ explained:

[T]he ones that fell among thorns are those who, when they have heard, go out and are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures of life, and bring no fruit to maturity.

I chanted some preliminary services (3rd hour and 6th hour) alone, starting in an empty Nave.

But since my last Reader Service, our parish has exploded, and by the time of the homily, roughly an hour later, we were at half-capacity, including first-time visitors for whom I was serving a service, and giving a homily, that constituted their very first experience of Orthodox Christianity. Others are such recent arrivals that I don’t know their background stories.

That reality so unsettled me that I couldn’t take any food afterward until maybe 4 pm. And for much of the afternoon, my thoughts kept turning to some vivid words of Father Stephen DeYoung, like me a former Calvinist.

The most current version of a Father Stephen motif was an observation about how many people rule out Christianity because of the extremely skewed versions surrounding us in North America today, and for roughly the last two centuries, truth be told (before that, it was less skewed).

I would have so loved to have had the liberty to remark on that, which may be as needful for hesitant unchurched toe-dippers, or for visitors who find something a bit “off” about their current Church, as the “thorny soil” parable is needful for practicing Orthodox Christians in our land today.

The locus classicus of Fr. Stephen’s motif was the closing remarks to a podcast roughly eighteen months ago:

I know that what I’m about to talk about is something I’ve talked about probably even fairly recently on the show, but I find myself in real life — meaning as a priest dealing with a group of parishioners, and trying to help them and guide them and just family members and everybody in general — I find myself having to say this over and over and over again, which tells me that probably if I say it over this microphone to people, there’s probably at least some folks out there who need to hear it again, even if I have talked about it recently.

The Christianity that those of us, at least in the United States — and I can only speak about that experience because I haven’t had any others — the Christianity we grew up around came from one of two categories largely. And people who want to defend those types of Christianity will call this a caricature. I don’t care anymore. But what I’m about to say, even if you think it’s a caricature of what they’re trying to teach, this is what a lot of the people within these traditions have actually received. Right? So it’s very easy to defend some tradition based on what’s in the books, and what we would mean to say, right? But I’m talking about what the people who I encounter, the people who talk to me about spiritual things. come to me and give confessions, what they’ve received from the Christianity they’ve grew up around, how that has shaped them, how they think because of it. And if people, representatives of those groups want to say that’s not what they meant to teach, cool, but maybe some introspection on why that’s not what people are receiving.

Anyway, what people have received comes in two categories. One is sort of the smilin’ Bob Shuler School of, “God loves you just the way you are and you don’t have to do anything. Just don’t worry about it. Just smile and be happy and listen to the hymns of your choice that you enjoy.” … That worked really well with boomers. That seemed to answer something they needed to hear. Maybe they’re a generation who grew up with very dissatisfied perfectionist parents, and so just hearing you’re fine just the way you are was what they needed, right? But that doesn’t work on subsequent generations, because subsequent generations are more realistic or nihilistic depending on your point of view, and know there’s something deeply wrong with themselves and with the world around them. So just telling them over again, “No, no, you’re fine, everything’s fine,” it doesn’t work. That’s why those kind of churches are all empty now.

The other school of thought is pretty much the exact opposite. It’s God doesn’t really love you. Right. In fact He’s pretty angry with you and He’s getting ready to send you to hell. Right? And the only way to avoid that is, depending on your tradition, right, is, for you to love him nonetheless, really sincerely — and there’s a rabbit hole to go down. How sincere am I ever really? — and do that plus live your life at a certain way and follow certain rules. Which will differ based on tradition, and which you will inevitably fail at.

That second one is most of the people who I interact with on spiritual matters, and it’s almost like they’ve been taught and they’ve internalized that. Their life in this world is this sort of really horrible reality show, almost like Squid Games, and like God is about weeding out contestants and narrowing it down to this faithful few and everybody else goes to hell, goes to eternal punishment except for this faithful few who, again, depending on your tradition, he may just pick. Or, you know, they’re the ones who really did it right. They’re the ones who really loved him sincerely, or they’re the ones who really lived their life the right way.

And any way you slice those things, most people again are realistic enough that when they look at their life, they don’t see a lot of evidence in their life and their actions that they’re one of the people God picked, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really sincere about following God, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really toeing the line and living the life they know they should be living, meaning most people are walking around — like religious people — walking around thinking they’re probably going to end up in hell. That God is probably mad at the most of the time, and that He’s looking for them to make some missteps so, boom!, they can get nailed.

Also most atheists are walking around doing the same thing they’re protesting constantly that there is no God because they can’t deal with that guilt and stuff that they’ve internalized. They can’t live like that. No one can live like that their route to trying to live like that and deal with the cognitive dissonance is just to deny that any of it’s true, over and over and over again publicly, loudly to everyone who will listen. Right.

Whereas the religious people are just in this kind of quiet desperation of how do I figure this out. Right.

So let me reiterate …:

God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands him to do so. No one commands him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.

When Saint Paul says to us, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You don’t stop them like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to his pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. We need to kind of imitate what the atheists are doing. We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that He is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person he created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all for any reason.

That’s what I have to say.

And that’s what I wish I could have communicated to our first-timers yesterday — what I hope was communicated though those words were unspoken.

But at the same time, I’m glad I couldn’t. As someone said to her Orthodox friend decades ago after her first Liturgy, “Wow! That was so not about me!” That “not about me” focus itself communicates something important.

Sunday October 18

Genus and Species

The central and absolutely essential premise of Ross Douthat’s new book Believe, the point from which the whole argument begins, is this: There is a genus of human belief and practice called “religion,” of which Christianity is one of the species. My problem with regard to Ross’s book is that I have come quite seriously to doubt this premise. My larger problem is that I don’t know quite how to do without this premise, since it is so deeply embedded in almost all discourse on … well, I guess I have to say on religion.

…

Emile Durkheim’s definition is a useful one: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions — beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in single moral community called a church”

…

I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)

Alan Jacobs, Douthat on Belief, quoting himself.

Thoughts about Greek Festival

Yesterday was the first day of our Greek Festival, and thus begins four straight days of talking with thousands upon thousands of people.

In the past, when people came for a tour of the inside of our Orthodox church, I could be sure that nearly 100% of the questions were related to the painting process regarding our church iconography:

“What kind of paint did they use to make all these pictures?” or “How long did it take the iconographer to finish this church?”

Yet, with this recent surge in Orthodoxy, our Greek Festival now brings in droves of people who are inquiring into the Orthodox Church, and the questions I got yesterday were a kaleidoscope of theological and historical inquiries:

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in penal substitutionary atonement?”

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in assurance of salvation?”

“Is the Orthodox Church Patriarchal?”

“Is the Orthodox Church anti-women?”

“Does the Orthodox Church believe in the Book of Jasher?”

One couple who came to my tour had been raised in a King James Version-only Baptist Church, and somewhere along their spiritual journey, they learned that Protestants had removed books from their Old Testament in the 1820s. He and his wife obtained a copy of the 1611 KJV, which predates the long-kept-quiet changing of the Protestant Bible.

Though the couple hadn’t yet read all of the books in their newly discovered Bible, they were very curious if the Orthodox Church was familiar with these books and what we believed about them.

Kenneth B, The Orthodox Church Is Growing in America. Two Holy Elders Predicted It Decades Ago.

If I may be permitted to quote a reasonably wise Evangelical apologist, that “kaleidoscope of theological and historical inquiries” requires a combination of “answering the question-behind-the-question” (e.g., “penal substitutionary atonement” presumes that the wages of sin is eternal torment) and asking for clarification of terms (e.g., what do you mean by “Patriarchal”?).

Ultimately, the inquirer needs a new frame, an altered paradigm, and I have no idea how to effectuate that with nothing more than words. It happened to me; I’ve never been able to induce it in anyone else.

That is why the all-purpose Orthodox answer is “Come and see.”

A Confessing Church today

Christians who vote for Republicans are called to be salt and light within the Republican Party. That means being a voice calling the Republican Party to obey the rule of law. Yours should be the loudest voice condemning Trump’s pardon for January 6 rioters and pushing against his challenge to the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the executive . You should speak up in favor of the poor and powerless and against the culture of cruelty, spite, and vengefulness Trump cultivates. It corrodes our public square and demeans our shared citizenship even as it poses more specific dangers to those targeted by Trump’s weaponization of federal law enforcement. If you do not speak up, you are both credulous and culpable, complicit with the party’s sins—including those yet to come.

If you vote for Democrats, you are called to be salt and light within the Democratic Party. That means calling on the Democratic Party to heed “Nature and Nature’s God.” The secular left sometimes gives off an odor of being godless, rootless, power-hungry moral relativists. They deny transcendent truth one day; the next, they announce a new truth, and their online mob will bully and harass us for failing to jump on their latest cause de jour. Their lack of moral foundation is exactly why they turn into moral authoritarians, certain of their own newfound truths—about race, class, and gender—and impatient for their fellow citizens to catch up. Open, tolerant, classically liberal government cannot survive without foundations, and Thomas Jefferson was right to point to nature and nature’s God as the right ones when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Natural law is transcendent, but not sectarian; it is a shared foundation on which believers in any religion or none can stand together.

These are the sorts of lessons a Confessing Church today would preach from its pulpits and podcasts. American Christians need a robust theology of civic engagement that teaches the moral good of republican government, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. It would teach respect for pluralism, anti-utopianism, and the wisdom that comes from learning from the history of totalizing political religions and their fruit. It would teach critical detachment from parties coupled with selective and narrow cooperation with them.⁠⁠

Paul D. Miller: A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment

Just in case you don’t understand that “Confessing Church” alludes to something in history, Wikipedia can help.

Truth vs. Practicality

American evangelicals never doubted that Christianity was the truth. They never doubted that Christian principles should illuminate every part of life. What they did do, however, in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, was to make most questions of truth into questions of practicality. What message would be most effective? What do people most want to hear? What can we say that will both convert the people and draw them to our particular church? The heavy pressure for results meant that very little time or energy was available to think about God and nature, God and society, God and beauty, or God and the shape of the human mind.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Christian Tradition and Slavery

The general course of the Christian church has been against slavery. This was undeniably true in the early history of the church. I know not that it has ever been alleged that any of the prominent defenders of the Christian faith among the “fathers” were advocates of slavery, or that any decree of synods or councils can be adduced in favour of the system.
Because abolitionists and antislavery theologians were forced to offer more complicated exegetical arguments, they were necessarily less persuasive. In other words, it appears that an untraditioned approach to theology was at least partially responsible for the failure of otherwise like-minded Christians to resolve the sectional crisis by any means other than war.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

Fundamentalism is not ancient Christianity

… the same historical representatives of the Christian faith that Maher chose to ignore (or has never heard of) are the Church Fathers that evangelical/fundamentalists also ignore for their own ideological reasons. They ignore them (or even denounce them) because the very existence of the early representatives of a more enlightened thread of Christianity undermines the evangelical/fundamentalist claim that somehow only fundamentalism represents the original ancient Christian faith. It does not.

Frank Schaeffer, Patience With God. I don’t consider Frank Schaeffer a reliable source, but I agree with him fully here.

So Walker Percy wrote a dystopia

The parallels to today become even more acute when Percy turns to religion. Political divides in Love in the Ruins have penetrated the churches, mainline Protestants aligning with the left and evangelicals with the right. Meanwhile, orthodox Catholics are but a remnant, most believers having joined either the American Catholic Church––which only prays the Latin Mass and plays the national anthem during the elevation of the Eucharist––or a coalition of Germanic schismatics, who have done away with the vow of celibacy as a prerequisite for priesthood.

Collin Slowey, Walker Percy’s Prescient Dystopia

Insipid and Slightly Insane

At a street corner, I happened to look up and caught sight of an electric sign, on top of a two-storey building. It read: “Clown Cigarettes.” I turned and fled from the alien and lunatic street, and found my way into the nearby cathedral, and knelt, and prayed, and did the Stations of the Cross. Afraid of the spiritual pressure in that monastery? Was that what I had said the other day? How I longed to be back there now: everything here, in the world outside, was insipid and slightly insane. There was only one place I knew of where there was any true order.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain

Sunday of the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council

The mind of the Fathers

Western Christian theology is founded on the phronema of Augustine. The East did not acquire the mind of one Father, but the mind of the Fathers.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind

There’s a lot more that could be said about this, but I’m not the guy to say it nor is this a good forum. That’s why I give you the link.

Redemptionist Theology

Christian horizons are limited by the drama played between God, who is infinitely offended by sin, and man, who is unable to satisfy the impossible demands of vindictive justice. The drama finds its resolution in the death of Christ, the Son of God who has become man in order to substitute Himself for us and pay our debt to divine justice. What becomes of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit here? His part is reduced to that of an auxiliary, an assistant in redemption, causing us to receive Christ’s expiated merit. . . . The price of our redemption having been paid in the death of Christ, the resurrection and the ascension are only a glorious happy end of his work, a kind of apotheosis without direct relationship to our human destiny. This redemptionist theology, placing all the emphasis on the passion, seems to take no interest in the triumph of Christ over death. The very work of the Christ-Redeemer, to which this theology is confined, seems to be truncated, impoverished, reduced to a change of the divine attitude toward fallen men, unrelated to the nature of humanity.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind

No creed but the Bible

By the 1840s one analyst of American Protestantism concluded, after surveying fifty-three American sects, that the principle “No creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion. John W. Nevin surmised that this emphasis grew out of a popular demand for “private judgment” and was “tacitly if not openly conditioned always by the assumption that every man is authorized and bound to get at this authority in a direct way for himself, through the medium simply of his own single mind.”48 Many felt the exhilarating hope that democracy had opened an immediate access to biblical truth for all persons of good will. Americans found it difficult to realize, however, that a commitment to private judgment could drive people apart, even as it raised beyond measure their hopes for unity.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

John Wilson Nevin, Philip Schaff and Mercerburg Seminary are three names that bring a wistful smile to my face. American Protestantism would, I’m almost positive, be much healthier had it heeded these far-seeing voices.

Change and decay around me all I see

I Didn’t Leave Protestantism Because I Hated It. I Left Because It Kept Changing

Frankly, that’s not why I left Protestantism. My church was changing relatively slowly. But I agree with the author completely about the facts: Protestantism does keep changing, and the more thoughtful Protestants make a virtue of that necessity: “Isn’t it wonderful that everyone can find a church to suit them!”

No. It would be wonderful if we were all one. You can look that up.

Meaning

They were freed from worry about getting their souls into God’s heaven by the discovery that they had no souls and that God had no heaven. They were freed from the terror of devils and plagues by the knowledge that the thing that was making them scream and foam was not an imp but only their own inability to cope, and that the thing that was clawing out their entrails was not divine wrath but only cancer. Altogether, life became much more livable since it was clear that in fact nothing lay behind things. The age was called enlightened.

The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything.

Tom Howard, Chance or the Dance?

Ancient Presbyterian mistrust

What she disapproves is not that I am doing public penance. No, what bothers her is an ancient Presbyterian mistrust of things, things getting mixed up in religion. The black sweater and the ashes scandalize her. Her eyelid lowers—she almost winks. What have these things, articles, to do with doing right?

Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

… and worst of all

This is so cringe.

It misrepresents (I’m pretty sure) Catholic teaching on the relationship of works and righteousness.
It cherry-picks and decontextualizes an Orthodox source who would disagree with its conclusions.
Worst of all, it reminds me of something equally cringe I wrote, and Christianity Today published, when I was young and foolish.

Sunday, 9/27/26

Beauty and truth

I would never have set out upon the journey that led me to the The Ethics of Beauty had I not read Jonathan Shay’s observation in his Achilles in Vietnam that contemporary analytical psychotherapy has been largely unable to heal the suffering of the soldiers afflicted most severely with post-traumatic stress disorder. I have slowly come to see that another way to read Shay would be to say that the initial focus of soul-healing must be on Beauty rather than on truth, on a living vision of a loving and crucified God, rather than on an autopsy of the broken self. … The fatal flaw of soul-therapy since Freud, by contrast, has been its insistence that truth and not beauty be our first concern; the repellant aspect of today’s political ideologies is rooted in a similar insistence.

Timothy G. Patitsas

Is “mere Christianity” Protestant?

It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople. To imagine that there is a set of cardinal doctrines that transcends ecclesial divisions and unites all people as “Christian” is inherently to speak and think as a Protestant.

So in that sense the best way to read what Scrivener calls the era of “mere christianity” is probably to regard it as a period of deficient Protestantism in which people presupposed Protestant conceptions of the church without understanding that they were doing that. They mistook their implicitly Protestant commitments for a kind of broadly Christian and ecclesially indifferent set of commitments. That is never what Lewis was trying to do in his own work, but it is how his work was received by highly democratic and anti-institutional American readers.

Jake Meador, a Protestant.

This reflects my own experience going from lower Protestant traditions to fully ecclesial Christianity. The late Richard John Neuhaus puts it this way:

An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one. In the words of the third-century St. Cyprian, martyr bishop of Carthage, “He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.”

In defense of Origen (and against spurious interpolations)

After Paul, there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted. It was Origen who taught the church how to read scripture as a living mirror of Christ, who evolved the principles of later Trinitarian theology and Christology, who majestically set the standard for Christian apologetics, who produced the first and richest expositions of contemplative spirituality, and who—simply said—laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought. Moreover, he was not only a man of extraordinary personal holiness, piety, and charity, but a martyr as well: Brutally tortured during the Decian persecution at the age of 69, he never recovered, but slowly withered away over a period of three years. He was, in short, among the greatest of the church fathers and the most illustrious of the saints and yet, disgracefully, official church tradition—East and West—commemorates him as neither.⁠

David Bentley Hart, putting more flesh on the bones of a story I’ve known for quite some time: somewhere along the line, after he was dead and gone, Origen got a bum rap.

What I didn’t know was that it wasn’t a Church Council that did it:

⁠I cannot really say what irks me more, though: that it happened or that, in fact, it really never did. The oldest records of the council (which was convened to deal solely with certain Antiochian theologians) make it clear that those fifteen anathemas were never even discussed by the assembled bishops, let alone ratified, published, or promulgated.⁠⁠ And ⁠⁠since the late nineteenth century various scholars have convincingly established that neither Origen nor “Origenism” was ever the subject of any condemnation pronounced by the “holy fathers” in 553. The best modern critical edition of the Seven Councils—Norman Tanner’s—simply omits the anathemas as spurious interpolations.

Compare and Contrast

American Religion

The result is a religious landscape dominated by popular Christian ideas that have “gone mad,” as G.K. Chesterton once put it, “because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” This America has a church of self-love, with prophets like Oprah Winfrey preaching a gospel of the divine self, a “God Within” spirituality that risks making selfishness a virtue. It has a church of prosperity, with figures like Joel Osteen as its bishops, that insists that God desires nothing more for his elect than American prosperity, capitalist success. And it has churches of politics, preaching redemption through political activism — a Christian nationalism on the right, by turns messianic and apocalyptic, and a progressive utopianism on the left, convinced that history’s arc bends always in its favor.

These heresies, I argued, are more important to understanding the true influence of religion in America than anything that comes out of the Roman Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention. You can understand our spiritual situation more completely by reading “The Da Vinci Code,” “Eat, Pray, Love” and “Your Best Life Now” than by browsing a papal encyclical (or for that matter an atheist polemic). And you can see more of Christianity’s enduring but now deformed influence in will.i.am’s celebrity hymns to Barack Obama in 2008, or Glenn Beck’s right-wing revivals a couple of years later, than in whatever cultural authority still attaches to the New Testament or the Nicene Creed.

Ross Douthat, The Americanization of Religion

Christianity

Father Maximos then went on to say how surprised he was to learn that there were so many people today that become victims of … charlatans. The most troublesome development, he mentioned, was the fact that many people considered him to be some kind of magician. “They come here at the monastery to find out whether someone has cast a spell on them, why they were abandoned by their lover or their husband and so on. At first I couldn’t figure out why they would come to me with such problems. Then I realize that they thought of me as some kind of sorcerer capable of undoing spells.“ Father Maximos shook his head and chuckled in his characteristic way.

“What do you tell them in such cases?“ I asked.

“What do you think? I tell them that there is no magic to resolve their problems, that they need to do spiritual work. I tell them that if they have a problem with demonic energies then they can follow the prescriptions the Ecclesia to heal themselves: confession, participation in the mysteries, fasting, charity, prayer, and askesis in general. That’s the way to do it.”

“So, there you are. You offer them a recipe on how to cast out the spell,” I pointed out in a light tone. “But are they receptive?”

“Hardly. Most people crave a quick fix. They are too lazy or unwilling to invest any effort of their own. They assume that if I read some magic formula over their heads, their problems will disappear. No need for them to change their ways. No need for them to engage in systematic prayer and askesis. Of course, some to follow the therapeutic guidelines of the Ecclesia and see results.”

Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence

The unity of the Church

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once commented that it had been granted to America, less than to any nation on earth, to realize the visible unity of the church of God.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, *sola scriptura* as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political [here](http://rwb.intellectualoid.com/). (b) I also post [some things](https://microblog.intellectualoid.com/) on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday, September 20, 2026

Atheism

I am convinced that the case for belief in God is inductively so much stronger than the case for unbelief that true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one’s own hopes or conceptual limitations.

David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God

Sola Scriptura in practice

Champions of sola scriptura thought they would set Christian theology and experiential knowledge on firm ground by liberating the rock of God’s word from papal tyranny. In fact, despite themselves they precipitated literally endless contestation about the Bible’s meaning, entangled faith with biblical scholarship in new ways, and unavoidably had respective and rival recourse to their own preferred, putative hermeneutic authorities amid competing claims about the meaning of God’s word.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

The problem, be it noted, is not “scriptura” but “sola.”

By the end of the 1570s, whatever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.

Eamon Duffey, The Stripping of the Altars

However differently they defined the essence of “New Testament” Christianity, the Holiness movement, Fundamentalists, and Pentecostals shared a passion for recovering the “pure fountain” and were equally dismissive of the church’s legacy over twenty centuries.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion

[T]he dispensationalist attack on the institutional church was an argument more likely to find a favorable audience in the United States, where evangelical churchmanship was relatively weak, than in Great Britain, where members of the state churches of England and Scotland exerted great influence in the evangelical movement.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

(I acknowledge evidence that dispensationalism is waning in influence in America; my point here is historic.)

For the world? Counter to the world?

The problem I see in the idea of the Church as the catalyst for cultural and/or civilizational renewal — even if it should become that in our time — is the erroneous implication that the Church exists for the sake of the world. She doesn’t. She stands more often than not — as the Bride of Christ, wedded to one Bridegroom — as a counter to the world, marked as the world order is by transient powers, constant instability, “freedoms” that aren’t true freedom, dubious ethics (“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world”; 1 John 2:16), “wars and rumors of wars,” and all the rest.

Addison Hodges Hart, How I Wandered Into Orthodoxy: An Uncharacteristically Personal Reflection.

I tend strongly to agree with Hart on this.

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

What color is your church?

For the last four years, I’ve been part of a church that some would describe as “purple.” I don’t like this term because it suggests a blending that doesn’t accurately portray the relationships I experience there. Still, the faithful who gather in the pews and serve elbow to elbow do sit along the political spectrum. Even more curiously, the church itself is part of a denomination in which the clergy skews more politically progressive than the laity—by a wide margin. Despite these differences, I can honestly say that I’ve never before experienced the kind of belonging I now experience in this church. I don’t think that is incidental.

Hannah Anderson, Will Politically Moderate Christians of Both Parties Work Together?

For the last twenty-nine years, I’ve been part of a church that some would describe politically as … heck, I don’t know.

I’m not interested in my fellow-believers’ political leanings. Sitting in coffee hour, I just don’t hear people talking politics. I knew one Greek fellow who detested American gun culture, but he had a pretty good reason: a disgruntled graduate student hunted down his brother (a professor) at UCLA and shot him to death. I suspect that some of our Greeks, and Romanians, and Russians, and Ukrainians, and our Serb, may be somewhere to my left if only because their roots are in Europe and Europe is generally left of the USA. Heck, most of the developed world is to our left.

So what? Are you really going to let political differences trump Christian unity? The only reason I would consider bringing politics up is to hear how and why someone else perceives the “fit” between their politics and their faith in order to expand my own understanding. And that seems more like a topic for “would you like to meet up for coffee sometime this week?” than for church coffee hour.

I became particularly sensitive to this sort of question when someone pointed out the chronic tendency of the New York Times, which famously does not “get” religion, to treat religion (or at least Christianity) as crypto-politics. I’m not really thrilled with the Dispatch for following suit.

So I guess I won’t have Hal Lindsey to kick around any more

Following up a hunch, I posed to AI a question about whether dispensational premillennialism is on the wane (I’ve lost track because it was never a thing in Orthodox Christianity, my home for 29 years now). The answer was “yes, decisively,” explicitly citing Daniel Hummel’s 2023 book The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, which concludes that dispensationalism is no longer considered a viable option among most Christian leaders or institutions.

That’s intrinsically good because dispensationalism is a relative novelty (~200 years, not 2000) and leads people to focus on lurid speculations, not on Christ.

Better yet, AI tells me that younger evangelicals are increasingly embracing amillennialism and postmillennialism; amillennialism is where I arrived 20 years before discovering Orthodoxy, and it’s one aspect of my mental living space where I didn’t have to rearrange any furniture on becoming Orthodox.

Postmillennialism is a little iffier. It comes in at least two flavors:

Christian Reconstructionist theocracy — Christians (usually Calvinists) ruling in accordance with God’s word. (Think of the “iconoclastic hammers and scraping-tools of conviction Protestantism” as described in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars)
Social Justice ushering in the Kingdom.

Forced to choose between 1 (jackboots) and 2 (squishes), I’d take 2, but I’m glad there is no forced choice.

Blessing and curse

American Orthodox theologian Thomas Hopko once remarked: “As the grandson of Carpatho-Russian immigrants to the United States, I cannot imagine my life in any other society, and I feel extremely grateful for my personal destiny. But as an Orthodox Christian . . . I cannot imagine a way of life more insidious to Christian Orthodoxy and more potentially dangerous to human being and life.”

John P. Burgess, Orthodoxy at War

Unintended Reformation

The best known and most successful modern example is probably the American polygamist and putative prophet Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in early nineteenth-century upstate New York. Smith’s assertions about the significance of the revelatory vision he claimed to receive … are strikingly similar to claims made by the Quaker George Fox: the confusing cacophony of competing Christian groups and their countervailing claims characterized New York’s “burned-over district” during the Second Great Awakening no less than it had England’s “world turned upside down,” in which Fox started preaching in 1647.

Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.

I was taught to distrust a short list of putatively pseudo-Christian “cults” because of, among other things, their demonstrable novelty:

Mormons
Jehovah’s Witnesses
Christian Scientists
Seventh Day Adventists

But I was taught that as a 20th-century American Evangelical, whose departure from Reformation Protestantism (itself a departure from the Roman Catholic departure from the original undivided Church) dates to the same period and from some of the same sort of impulses, with an unhealthy democratic egalitarianism — heck, call it “populism” — thrown in. Their theorists would tell you they were recovering the uncorrupted early church.

But what if the faith of the early church was always maintained in a visible Church and didn’t need to be recovered?

History Rhymes, of course

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

A heartening convergence

Orthodox theology defines only what is necessary and always leaves unspoken that which cannot be explained. This approach was part of the Christian faith from the beginning. But the Western [mindset] often suppresses, dismisses, minimizes, or ignores this stance. The Western mind is compelled to define and explain everything, since without a rational explanation a concept or fact cannot be considered true, or, conversely, all truth can be proven rationally.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

One of the interesting convergences I’ve noticed is between Orthodox apophaticism and the importance of the right hemisphere (versus the more analytical left) as explicated by Iain McGilchrist. I feel affirmed.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Sunday, August 16, 2026

From “High church” perspective

The man who is entirely convinced

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Anselm’s god

It is nothing short of blasphemous to base an understanding of salvation on the idea that God gets angry or has a brittle ego. Anselm’s god is not the God of the Church, but a medieval monarch projected into the heavens.

Clark Carlton

Theotokos

Yesterday, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox celebrated the Assumption (Catholic)/Dormition (Orthodox) of the Theotokos, the Mother of God — a title we recognize for good reason:

Mary was not just a temporary or purely physical conduit of the Incarnation. The relationship between Jesus and his mother was transpersonal and transcendent to biology. She was truly the mother, and not simply the “bearer,” of God’s Son.

Patrick Henry Reardon, The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth About the Humanity of Christ

I have heard this important truth dismissed, with Mary discussed as if she were a pipe and Jesus were water flowing down from heaven to earth through her, disguised as a human I guess. In fact, I heard it on WMBI, the flagship station of mainstream Evangelicalism in my day.

And no, I’m not exaggerating. Granted, it was a kind of devotional show, not deeply theological, and aimed at women, which may or may not have contributed to such slop passing whatever filters Moody Bible Institute had. If this were actually a firm opinion of the speaker, she would be a heretic.

The early Ecumenical Councils were all focused on the person of Christ. One such Council rejected calling Mary “Mother of Christ” in favor of “Mother (birth-giver) of God,” the point being to give no quarter to those who would divide Christ’s humanity from his deity. But Mary gets a lot of glory reflected onto her from her Son.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche was limited in his understanding of Christianity by the forms it assumed following the eleventh-century Papal Reformation and the later sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. He therefore suffered, as have all Westerners since the Great Division, from a deficit in the experience of Orthodoxy. For hundreds of years, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism were the only Christian options known to Western thinkers. The old Christendom of the first millennium was forgotten, and the new Christendom that evolved from the Great Division was separated from Eastern Christendom.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

I would not suggest that Nietzsche would have dropped all objection to Christianity had he encountered the first millennium expression, preserved in the Christian East, nor that his critique of Christianity is like rain off the back of a duck to Eastern Christians. He’s still an acid test for the Christian profession of anyone of a philosophical bent.

From, loosely speaking, middle church

Spittle-flecked modernism

[Ralph] Elliott said his liberal professors knew how not to run afoul of the more conservative base by knowing just how to speak: one way in the doctoral seminar, another at a revival meeting. I once heard one professor of this generation speak, a biblical scholar who taught his graduate students the then-standard historical-critical view that the Book of Isaiah was written by two or three or many people, centuries apart, one of whom may have been the actual Isaiah.

In the pulpit, though, this scholar said, “Some people get all sidetracked over whether there was one Isaiah or more. I say, if one Isaiah is good, two’s better! Amen! And if two Isaiahs are good, then three’s better! Amen! In this fallen world in need of Jesus, we need every Isaiah we can get.” The crowd roared in approval, none the wiser that they had just amen-ed modernist biblical criticism.

… Elliott concluded the doublespeak was about power, not truth. People employed theological jargon precisely because it enabled them to camouflage what really mattered to them: organizational power.

Russell Moore, Blasphemy Laws Are Blasphemy.

For what it’s worth, Orthodoxy doesn’t choke on modern biblical scholarship as much as fundamentalists and evangelicals do. That’s a long story, and I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified to tell it. But I benefit from it.

Still, having lived in an anti-“modernist” world for almost two-thirds of my life, I found this anecdote interesting. You could do worse than reading Moore’s whole column.

Something to cling to

To know that the Biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing. The poor fundamentalists are trying to cling to their moral structure. I understand why, because it does organize their societies and their psyche. So they’ve got something to cling to, but they don’t have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of what constitutes truth. They try to gerrymander the Biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory—promoting creationism, for example, as an alternative scientific theory. It’s like, that just isn’t going to go anywhere. The people who wrote these damned stories weren’t scientists to begin with. There weren’t any scientists back then—there’s hardly any scientists, now.

Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God Transcript.

I’m not endorsing Jordan Peterson as a Bible interpreter or as anything else. My personal fascination with him is long over — because logorrhea wears me out, I think. So I don’t even know whether he’s broadly right or broadly wrong about things.

But he’s at least directionally right here about the protestant fundamentalist approach to the Bible.

The sects and the Bible

A similar, but more sophisticated, complaint of monograph length came from John W. Nevin in 1849 when he rounded on what he called the sect system. According to Nevin, “This professed regard for the Bible” was what “distinguishes the sects in general.” But to Nevin the difficulty in that profession was as manifest as it was stupendous: “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way…they are flung asunder so perpetually…instead of being brought together?” This anomaly showed that the principle of “no creed but the Bible” was “absurd and impracticable”; it breathed “the spirit of hypocrisy and sham.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Panning low church

Sundry flakes

Ellen Davis, who teaches theology at Duke Divinity School, recounts how one of her students “had a job interview at a Christian school in California where staff members cited the lack of recycling bins as an expression of their faith: by using up ‘resources’ as quickly as possible, they were hastening the coming of the Lord.”

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

Granted, that’s nut-picking, but it’s a “truth is stranger than fiction” nut. Much commoner is to watch conflict between Israel and its neighbors with unseemly intensity because one is convinced that “the coming of the Lord” becomes more imminent particularly as peace goes south in the Bible lands.

I “followed” Phillips, the author of Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation, on his journey to Orthodoxy through Calvinism — superficially like my journey, but Phillips was far more philosophically inclined than I. He was fretting about gnosticism infiltrating putative Christianity while still Protestant, penning one pivotal piece titled Are Calvinists Also Among the Gnostics?. I don’t know how he would modify it were he to write on the topic again from an Orthodox position.

Reductionist Evangelicalism

Rod Dreher recounts his argument with a nondenominational Evangelical who contended that church in the Metaverse is the wave of the future:

At one point, I asked him if there was, to him, any spiritual difference between worshiping in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and doing so in a tent church set up in a Wal-mart parking lot. He said no. At that point I gave up. For him, churchgoing was about nothing more than exchanging information and being in the company of like-minded worshipers. You could do that in the Metaverse, he said; there was no meaningful difference between fellowshipping in person, and virtually.

This reductionist view was not one I can recall holding, and my not holding it may have contributed to my separation from what I call “frank evangelicalism” to a Reformed faith that was occasionally evangelical-adjacent. I hope it’s a fringe position, but I catch a whiff of it every time someone says Orthodox and Catholics spend too much money beautifying the places where they worship.

Not just a little manipulation, but a deeply pernicious manipulation

Here’s a typical Friday night youth group meeting. After the songs had been sung and the sermon had been preached and the eyes were closed (by most) and the mood was soft, the pastor would come up on stage and lay it on thick. “How many of you are still holding something back from God? He wants all of you!” The problem is, he would say this to thirteen-year-olds who had no clue who they were yet. So to say, “I give all of myself to God” can easily morph into “I give all of myself to whatever the leaders tell me to do.” Talk of surrender is more credible, and a lot more respectful of each child’s humanity, if leaders are also giving young people critical thinking skills. Why not teach them Bible basics and the creeds while giving the child space to think for themselves, without emotional manipulation? Well, I can think of a reason. It’s harder to control kids that way.

Jon Ward, Testimony (bold added)

I knew long ago that the wheedling “evangelists,” who Ward portrays accurately (though my encounters were in evangelistic crusades, not regular Friday night youth groups) were engaged in a kind of psychological manipulation. But Ward, in the italicized portion, heightens my understanding of the perniciousness of that manipulation.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Onus probandi, nihil obstat, imprimatur – Tipsy goes all Latin

Onus probandi

[W]herever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position. The legitimate reformer endeavours to show that the precept in question conflicts with some precept which its defenders allow to be more fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judgement of value it professes to embody.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

What happened to the nihil obstat and imprimatur?

[T]he very thought of an imprimatur on the front of a book—the approbation of a bishop, allowing the book to be printed on the grounds that it contains safe doctrine—is something that drives some people almost out of their minds with indignation.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain It has been a very long time since I thought of the nihil obstat and the imprimatur. Do they still do that?

I’m not asking that question in the spirit of “How barbaric!”, but simply because it feels like decades since I saw one. Inasmuch as the Roman Catholic Church has no power in the US, or anywhere in the world so far as I know, to prevent publication of a book, the nihil obstat or imprimatur would serve, if used, entirely as a guide to the faithful, and I cannot object to that.

Orthodoxy and Israel

The prophecy of Isaiah 42 about Israel’s king was fulfilled in Christ and His Church, and in this it is typical of all the Old Testament passages about the Kingdom of God. However, within the last century or so, a school of thought has arisen (sometimes called “Dispensationalism”) which sees the Old Testament prophecies of Israel’s restoration fulfilled in the creation of the modern State of Israel. For this school, the “Israel” in the Old Testament prophecies refers to the Jews generally and the Zionist state in particular. … Whatever one’s sympathy for the State of Israel, it must be recognized that this school of interpretation is in flat contradiction to the apostolic view of the Old Testament prophecies. Each and every time the Old Testament prophecies are quoted by the apostles, it is in connection with Christ and His Church.

Lawrence R. Farley, The Gospel of Matthew.

I could say “this is the Orthodox agnosticism about the Israeli nation-state,” but I think that would be too narrow. Rather, the claim is that it is the Biblical view, with which claim I agree.

This do in remembrance

If recollecting Christ’s sacrifice cognitively were the only purpose of the sacrament, then we would do just as well skipping those tiny plastic cups and wafers that taste like cardboard and simply recite the Scriptures instead.

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Sunday, July 12, 2026

I saw a theme trying to emerge from what I’m calling the main course, but I don’t think I teased it out successfully. Read with your heart and you may see it.

The main course

Road to Emmaus

Most Christians are presumably familiar with the account of Luke and Cleopas encountering Christ on the road to Emmaus. But I think I missed a lot about it in my years as a low-brow, then middle-brow, Protestant.

For one thing, the “between the lines” message of Luke 24:27, which is echoed in the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch:

The Old Testament is full of Christ, but a lot of it is typological, and thus easily overlooked.
We cannot rightly interpret scripture on our own, without a guide and without Christ as the interpretive key.
The details of Christ’s explanation to Luke and Cleopas, and of Philip’s explanation to the Eunuch, are surely important but are not given in scripture; that, along with John 21:25 suggests an important tradition that was not enscripturated, but passed down (from Luke and Cleopas to Philip, perhaps) in the Church, the pillar and foundation of truth.

Later, in Luke’s narrative, the double mention of Christ becoming know to the Apostles “in the breaking of bread” hints at the Eucharist. Perhaps Christ “broke bread” in a distinctive way both in the upper room and in Emmaus. I’m not now, and perhaps never, going to try to unpack that very far. Suffice that Roman Catholic and Orthodox teachers focus on different aspects of that in ways that feel complementary to me, but I sense treacherous ground here.

Orthodoxy and Syncretism

Being Orthodox in mind requires that one accept ambiguity, uncertainty, mystery, and paradox. Perhaps this encourages humility before God. We cannot rely on clever explanations or beloved definitions, and we must accept that we cannot completely explain or fully understand our faith. Therefore, we must rely solely on the grace and mercy of God. Perhaps this allows us to focus less on the mind and more on the heart, which is where we encounter God.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

This is an amazing book, which captures better than I thought possible the experience of being Orthodox. I know that because I had been officially Orthodox for some 20 years when it came out, and had (because I’m my parish’s Cantor) attended more services that just about anyone besides Priests and Deacons, and thus was beginning to get the hang of things. But reading it and trying to think the way it describes will not make you Orthodox. Becoming Orthodox requires reception into a Parish and a lot of humble attention. Anything less will make you a syncretist.

One of the little mysteries

Yesterday I gave a friend a ride to church. She is a scholar in town this week to do some research. Because of a serious injury in a car accident last year, she can’t drive. Her ability to speak is greatly diminished, and I had to listen closely to understand what she said. After liturgy, though, her speaking was normal again. What?!

“This happens after I receive the Eucharist,” she said. “Everything is normal again, for a while.”

Rod Dreher

Propositional truth, practical results, efficiency

Discourses that could speak of the value of uncertainty and of belief as opposed to certainty, of the repetitive shaping of the self rather than a deterministic operation according to natural tendency, and of personal interaction with a God not operating according to predetermined, fixed laws-these were in a very real sense swallowed up by Western modernity’s esteem for propositional truth, practical results, and efficiency, and the languages in which these were valued.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity.

“The repetitive shaping of the self” is why being parish Cantor, which requires my presence in services that are sparsely attended, is such a blessing.

A lay Orthodoxen encounters Calvinism

I had to make a long drive yesterday, and took my reading of historian Carlos Eire’s Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 to audiobook.

…

The long chapters on Zwingli and Calvin were amazing — but they put a chill on me. Eire explains that the dispute between Luther and the Swiss Reformers had a lot to do with metaphysics. The Reformed were strongly anti-sacramental. They believed that there was no real correspondence between the realm of the spirit and the material realm. Listening to Eire’s explanation of Reformed theology, and its fruits, I thought that this is the Perfect System designed by brilliant men who don’t understand what it means to live in a body.

Rod Dreher

For what it’s worth

Context matters

Wives, therefore, are called to submit to their husbands—not that they had much choice within the Roman Empire. What is radical, however, about Paul’s statements on marriage for this era is his command that husbands love their wives and do so self-sacrificially.

Stephen De Young, Saint Paul the Pharisee

Everything matters

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.

Poet Evangeline Paterson (H/T Mark Noll)

An antichrist

Niebuhr counseled in Christianity and Power Politics that the “man of power is always to a certain degree an anti-Christ.” Such a sentiment would be entirely alien to TheoBros, who want nothing more than to be men of power.

Ed Simon, Where Have All the Protestants Gone?.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg