From early adolescence to age forty-nine, my life as a Christian (which started when I was very young) was very American, in Evangelical and Calvinist modes. I got into it pretty deeply, as I have a compulsion to figure things out, and that involved reading lots of stern explanations (“theology”).
Then, twenty-eight or so years ago, I stumbled into an Orthodox Christian Church:
Having settled in for a few decades, what have I found uniquely true about the Orthodox Church?
It’s hard to put into words. That’s why Orthodox evangelism tends to consist of “come and see.”
Harder still for me personally, I need to find words for feelings and tendencies that an intellectualoid has trouble trusting — things that may be true but approach ineffability. I have a Dostoyevsky “Beauty Will Save the World” sticker on my office window, but long habit and self-image keep pulling me back toward “Spock-like logic … will save the world.”
Yesterday, though, I heard something that can serve as a decent summary that I suspect that a lot of American Christians need to hear:
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 there 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 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.
O Lord and Master of my life, Take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power and idle talk. But grant rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to Thy servant.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions and not to judge my brother …
(Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian, recited over and over and over again, with prostrations, by Eastern Orthodox Christians during Lent.)
I’ve tended for many decades now to discuss things, outside of clearly religious contexts, in non-religious terms. It’s not from any effort to deceive, but instinctive. I guess I’ve absorbed by osmosis the Rawlesian dogma that public discourse requires public reason.
(Lest I now deceive, I acknowledge that many of the terms in the preceding paragraph are debatable, starting with the dubious category of “religion.”)
But I caught myself the other day attributing my increasing patience to my advancing (age and thus the accumulation of anecdotes where I was wrong, someone else right).
But I’m not so sure. Two geezers within the past week or two have impatiently shot innocent people who mistakenly approached their homes. Apparently “older” and “more patient” don’t necessarily go together.
Might my increasing patience have something to do with now 25 years of that prayer?
I’ve only got one life to live. I cannot scientifically separate those prayers, and a quiet divine response, from all else that has accompanied my life. But the concept of “crotchety old man” makes me suspect that mere aging, even self-reflective aging, does not alone explain patience and tolerance.
Socrates, Plato, Lao Tzu
Even the staunchest Christians in Greece refer to Socrates as “the Apostle to the pagans.” The best-loved Greek saint of the 20th century, St. Nektarios of Pentapolis, said that Socrates and “divine Plato” were at times “inspired by God.” If the Greek philosophers can be honored in this way, cannot also Lao Tzu, who came even closer than they to describing the Logos, the Tao, before he was made flesh and dwelt among us?
The stringency of Christianity’s sexual teachings gets most of the press, but the commandment against avarice, if taken seriously, can be the faith’s most difficult by far. You can wall yourself off from pornography and avoid people who tempt you into adultery, but everybody has to work—and every day in the workplace is a potential occasion of sin. The prosperity gospel does away with this anxiety. Like most heresies, it resolves one of orthodoxy’s tensions by emphasizing one part of Christian doctrine—in this case, the idea that the things of this life are gifts from the Creator, rather than simply snares to be avoided, and that Christians are expected to participate in the world rather than withdraw from it.
The Egyptian church father next explains why God did not merely save mankind by way of a simple declaration of a clean bill of health. Our cure, Athanasius declares, requires more than merely a spoken word. Salvation, for Athanasius, is not just an external or nominal matter; it is a participatory – or real – event.
Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation
Emotivism
If you don’t know who Eric Metaxas is, you may just want to skip this one as I’m not sure you need to know.
The thing is, a heck of a lot of Americans, both on the Left and the Right, have done the same thing. Over forty years ago, Alasdair MacIntyre identified “emotivism” as the default moral reasoning position of the contemporary West. That is, we have become the kind of people who believe that truth is what we feel it is. By now, we have created a culture built on emotivism. In one extreme expression of it, we say that an individual can determine his or her sex based not on their body and their genetic profile, but entirely on their feelings. I hope Eric Metaxas and Caitlyn Jenner met in a green room somewhere, and were friendly, because they have a lot more in common than either might have thought.
If you make the pursuit of truth your telos, you might not ultimately find it — truth can be elusive — but you stand a good chance of keeping your integrity, even if you fall into deceit. But if you place fear of the crowd above the pursuit of truth, as Fox did, or live by an emotivist epistemology in which you never analyze your emotional response, as Eric Metaxas did, well, it’s likely to cost you plenty.
On the other hand, last September, Eric released a book titled, Letter To The American Church, in which he goes all Bonhoeffer in calling on US Christians to resist evil. Hey, that’s a message I can endorse! But coming from him? The Upper East Side dandy who exhorted American Christians to shed blood to defend Donald Trump’s election lies?
Rod Dreher, Eric Metaxas And The MAGA Inner Ring. I bought Metaxas’ latest book out of curiosity, and it is truly very bad. My eyes don’t light up at the utility of “emotivism” to explain it, but I have no better summary.
If there is any coherent philosophy behind Metaxas’ strange and vehement Christianish fixations, it must be akin to that of the New Apostolic Reformation folks:
that the offices of Apostle and Prophet still exist; and
that those offices come willy-nilly on whomever the Lord chooses, not by any orderly and ecclesial process.
The NAR folks, however and so far as I know, don’t write letters “to the American Church” haranguing their fellow-Christians that they’re stupid, evil, complicit, crypto-Nazis if they don’t believe the writer’s private revelations.
Other stuff
Game recognizes game
Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle.
There are few ideas, tropes, narratives, myths—whatever you want to call them—more enduring than the notion that very rich people are villainously pulling strings behind the scenes to do villainous things.
I want to be clear: It’s a bipartisan tendency. But the chief difference between right-wing and left-wing versions is that the left-wing versions are treated as serious theories by establishment journalists, academics, and experts while the right-wing versions are usually dismissed as paranoid or bigoted fantasies by those very same academics and experts. “The Koch brothers are behind this!” is acceptable political rhetoric, but, “Soros is behind this!” is antisemitic paranoia. (Yes, antisemites use Soros as a foil, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t meddling in American politics.)
There’s a story about the USA being dedicated to human equality and dignity from (at least) the time of the Declaration of Independence.
The story is nearly universal, and it’s rhetorically useful in politics, and I dare say denying it would be a political kiss of death in almost every congressional district in the country.
But it is false.
The Declaration of Independence was not a statement about human rights in the abstract; it was not a declaration of concrete human rights, either. As the title tells us, it is not about rights at all; it is about independence. It was written at a specific moment and for a specific purpose, designed to do two things: to announce that the American colonists were throwing off allegiance to the British Crown and to justify that act.
Thus the 3/5 clause (slaves counting as 3/5 of a person) in the Constitution was not a solecism on the grammar of the Declaration. If you can face up to that, you can take solace that we now are formally dedicated to equality, as a result of the Civil War amendments and Reconstruction. (I would even say we are so madly dedicated to equality that we ignore truly relevant distinctions and increasingly ignore several rights that entitle people to opt out of the equality regime. But that’s a topic for another day.)
I’m not 100% on board with Roosevelt on everything, but having just finished, at age 74, my first actual reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that block quote dovetails not only with the vision of the little woman who wrote the book that started [a] big war, but with some threads of legal realism I’d previously picked up. When you see multiple “data points” pointing in the same direction, you can’t help but feel that you’re onto something.
It was always the race problem
God, it was always the [race problem], now, just as in 1883, 1783, 1683, and hasn’t it always been that since the first tough God-believing Christ-haunted cunning violent rapacious Visigoth-Western-Gentile first set foot here with the first black man: the one willing to risk everything, take all or lose all, the other willing just to wait and outlast because once he was violated all he had to do was wait because sooner or later the first would wake up and know that he had flunked, been proved a liar where he lived, and no man can live with that. And sooner or later the lordly Visigoth-Western-Gentile-Christian-Americans would have to falter, fall out, turn upon themselves like scorpions in a bottle.
We owe a cornfield respect, not because of itself, but because it is food for mankind. In the same way, we owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind—country, family or any other—not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
A brief digression
I had paid exactly zero attention to the Dylan Mulvaney kerfuffle. It had peripherally thrusted itself onto my attention a time or two — just enough that I probably could have told you that Dylan Mulvaney was a “trans woman” who did a Budweiser ad, and the some people had their knickers in a knot over it.
But then Andrew Sullivan weighed in, and my default position is that if he takes the time to write about something, it’s probably worth a little of my time to read it.
I won’t say that I was richly rewarded, but I learned some more about Dylan Mulvaney including Andrew’s theory:
There is, in fact, a perfect word to describe Dylan Mulvaney. She isn’t trans or queer or subversive so much as a minstrel. She’s performing a deeply misogynistic version of a Disney princess for an audience that is uncomfortable with actual transgender people whose appearance is not monetizable and whose lives are more than gay parodies of blonde ditzes. But minstrelsy has always been lucrative — and I don’t fault Dylan for seeing an opening here, and succeeding beyond what must have been his/her wildest dreams.
What I worry about is what happens to Dylan as this buzz eventually wears off. She’s only 26, and has a lifetime to live after her 12 months of TikTok fame. The future may not be as pretty as she currently is.
I shall now, I hope, be able to return to ignoring this constellation of unedifying provocations and counter-provocations.
MAID is inexpensive, completely effective, and easily delivered. If we do not resist it, the system will, as if pulled by gravity, increasingly provide suicide and euthanasia instead of healing for the poor, elderly, and severely ill.
[A]n ideology is a conceptual system that oversimplifies reality while claiming to explain it comprehensively, and that justifies its political rule by insisting that, if social and political reality could just be made to conform to its conceptual schema, all problems would be resolved … Part of the “real nature of all ideologies” is that, not only do they misrepresent reality, but they are necessarily in active conflict with it.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Especially given the events of the 20th century, the rise of Communism, Fascism, world and regional wars and the persecution and slaughter or men, women and children because of religious or ideological differences, the virtue of obedience has–understandably–fallen into disrepute not only among non-Christians but Christians as well. It is as if we have said, personally and collectively, “I have been betrayed by those in authority and so I will no longer trust anyone but myself.” While not universally the case, many of us–again whether Christian or not–live not so much in willful disobedience but in helpless fear. At its core our not wholly unreasonable suspicion of obedience reflects the scars left by love and trust abused.
The Gospel this morning, however, places obedience at the center of our attention. And it is not simply a generic obedience but the kind of obedience we have come as a culture to dread and fear I think more than any other. It is a soldier’s obedience to his commander; a commander’s expectation of obedience from his troops. “…I also am a man under authority, having soldiers under me. And I say to this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it” (v. 9).
Hearing this, the Gospel says that Jesus, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, He Who is God from All-Eternity become Man, the Creator become a Creature, “marvels.” At this moment, it is not a man who stands in awe of God, but God Who stands in awe of a man. Jesus then turns to His disciples, to His friends and those to whom He is closest and says
Assuredly, I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel! And I say to you that many will come from east and west, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (vv. 10-12).
Neither the man’s race–he was a Gentile–nor his profession–he was a Roman solider and so responsible for enforcing the Emperor’s will–keeps him from being an exemplary, an icon if you will, of faith. If anything, a life time of military service had taught him what it means to entrust not only his own life, but the lives of those he loved, to someone else.
When we think about obedience and its place in Christian life, we often unconsciously adopt the narrow and frankly deformed notion of obedience that is current in our culture. As a Christian virtue, obedience is not mechanical, it does not deform or obscure what is unique in the person. Much less does Christian obedience require that we sacrifice our freedom.
What it does require from me, however, is that I sacrifice my willful self-centeredness, my pretense, my myriad affectations and all the little ways in which I pursue the good opinions of others rather than the will of God.
So what do we mean, in a positive sense, by the Christian virtue of obedience?
First and foremost, before it is anything else, obedience is entrusting myself to the care of God. We see this in the Gospel; the centurion has absolute confidence that Christ can heal his servant. He say to Jesus, “only speak a word, and my servant will be healed” (v. 8).
We should linger momentarily on this verse because it contains a second characteristic of Christian obedience. The centurion doesn’t simply trust Jesus in a general sense. Nor is his trust limited to his own life. No, the centurion trusts Jesus on behalf of his servant.
We see this again and again in the Gospels. Jesus heals, for example, the paralytic let down through the roof not because of his faith, but in response to the faith of his friends (Matthew 9:1–8; Mark 2:1–12; Luke 5:17–26). Or, to take another example (John 2:1-11), Jesus changes water into wine not at the request of the steward of the feast or of the bridegroom. No what He does for them He does in response to the faith of His Mother the Most Holy Theotokos who is herself a model of obedience (see Luke 11:28).
Christian obedience to God is always an mutual obedience. It isn’t simply your obedience or my obedience; it is rather always our obedience. We are obedient to God together because Christian obedience is both a personal and a communal virtue.
Intuitively we know this. Think how easily someone’s bad example can infect us. My obedience is never simply mine alone. It is dependent on yours, even as yours depends upon mine.
So what do we see? While ultimately, obedience is always obedience to God, somewhat closer to our everyday life my obedience to God embraces the willingness of those around me to entrust themselves to God as well. Again, we see this in the Gospel.
We also see something else in today’s Gospel and in the other passages to which I alluded. The obedient Christian is sensitive not only to God’s will for his own life but also to the will of God for his neighbor. Especially in an American context, this is one of the most neglected aspects of obedience.
Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov’s in The Arena (p. 45) we are reminded that it is only “Faith in the truth saves.” But faith in what is untrue, faith “in a lie” is the fruit of “diabolic delusion” and “is ruinous, according to the teaching of the Apostle” (see, 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12). We need to be discerning about how we live out obedience on a day to day basis. Precisely because obedience is always shared, we ought not to be obedient to those who do not demonstrate by their own lives that (1) they are themselves obedient to God and (2) that they are obedient to God’s will for our lives.
This is not meant to be a writ for self-will. Rather it is to remind us that to “At the heart of leadership within the Church is the care of souls.” For this reason, those to whom we are asked to be obedient must themselves be willing to be held “accountable for the lives and faith of those with whom [they have] been entrusted.” A leader–a bishop, a priest, a spiritual father or a husband, a wife or parent–cannot expect obedience from others unless he or she unless “the model” of their “own life” is a clear example of “integrity of … faith and conduct” and their “oversight of others” gives to them an ever greater share of “responsibility to … fulfill” their own vocation (see, Metropolitan Jonah, “Episcopacy, Primacy, and the Mother Churches: A Monastic Perspective“).
While this is a lofty standard, it is not one alien to common sense. We are free in Christ and real obedience in Christ is therefore freeing. True obedience doesn’t cripple us, but liberates us from anxiety and worry and all the myriad little and great sins that hold us captive to sin and death. But obedience is not magic but is the right exercise of my freedom in relationship to both God and my neighbor. That I must grow in freedom, that my understanding and acceptance of freedom will (hopefully) grow and mature over time doesn’t change this. If anything, it highlights that Christian obedience is only possible where divine grace and human freedom converge.
This brings us back, in a positive way I think, to our culture’s suspicion of obedience. The recent history I outlined a moment ago, to say nothing our own own personal histories, provide us with ample evidence for while a mechanical and undiscerning submission to the will of another human being is unwise. And this is just as true, maybe even more true, when the other person’s claims to speak for God.
Just as a solider must disobey an unlawful order, we must disobey those who counsel or command immorality or rebellion against God. But, and again like the solider, when we do this we must also be willing to bear the consequences for our disobedience. As I said a moment ago, authority and accountability travel together and I ought not to imagine that I can resist immorality without cost.
Thank God at least within the Church these situations are relatively rare (though even one instance is one too many). In the main when conflict arises in the Church it does because we disagree on the practical, everyday details of life. The first to realize when this happens is that honest disagreement is not the same as disobedience. A difference of vision shouldn’t be equated with rebellion or a lack of faith.
All this being true, I think it is important that when I find myself in these kinds of practical conflicts I defer to authority. Deference is I think the everyday form that Christian obedience takes. In a funny way, it is easier for me to practice obedience in “big things.” Much harder is deference in the little things of life. And yet, what does Jesus tell us? “He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much; and he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much” (Luke 16:10).
What makes Christian obedience so difficult is that it almost always demands of me fidelity in what is least. This is hard because what I want from God is the grand vision, the master plan. And I want this because, to be honest, it makes me feel important.
But what I get from God is typically only the next step or two down the road. My willingness to take that step or two is, in the final analysis, the true test of my obedience.
(I particularly like that characteristic Orthodox inversion: “At this moment, it is not a man who stands in awe of God, but God Who stands in awe of a man.”)
I suspect it’s not coincidental the the epistle today (see link above) invites us to “slavery” to righteousness — a virtue that ranks right down there with obedience, in the cellar of our modern values. But the stakes couldn’t be higher: the gift of eternal life.
For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness.
… But now having been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I’m not sure I’m fit to sermonize even that much, so I’ll shut up now.
One of my blind spots as a Protestant was the need for formal confession, which we dismissed as “auricular confession” and considered a patent superstition and absurdity. “Who needs a priest to confess?!”
A nice, simple explanation of why we Orthodox confess to a Priest: salvation is more than forgiveness.
… If someone sincerely repents of a sin done by him, of course God will forgive him. But for salvation this is not enough. The Lord came down to earth and was incarnate so that man would be transfigured and reborn. To make him a new creation in Christ (cf., 2 Cor. 5:17). For this the Lord established the Holy Mysteries – sacred actions in which, under a visible image, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the invisible grace of God is given, freeing man from life in sin and giving him life with God. Man cannot perform upon himself a single Mystery – Baptism, Marriage, Unction….
So, is the Catholic view — the Protestant target, with the arguments carried over as an objection to Orthodoxy ad hoc — essentially the same? It appears that it differs:
“The whole power of the sacrament of Penance consists in restoring us to God’s grace and joining us with him in an intimate friendship.” Reconciliation with God is thus the purpose and effect of this sacrament. For those who receive the sacrament of Penance with contrite heart and religious disposition, reconciliation “is usually followed by peace and serenity of conscience with strong spiritual consolation.” Indeed the sacrament of Reconciliation with God brings about a true “spiritual resurrection,” restoration of the dignity and blessings of the life of the children of God, of which the most precious is friendship with God.75
The Orthodox emphasis in contrast is on transformation and rebirth. Indeed, the best part of confession by my lights is when the Priest prescribes a penance that I hadn’t thought of as a way to root out the detestable sin.
The Protestant equivalent, it seems to me, is the “counseling ministry” of big Churches. But the problem is there’s no mention of counseling ministries in the Bible that Protestants claim as their sole authority. Like Biblically baseless “infant dedication” services (faux baptism for anabaptists whose consciences tell them that their children are precious to God now, and not just potentially precious if they “pray the Sinner’s Prayer®” some day), it’s an ersatz solution to a problem that doesn’t exist in historic Christianity.
Some people living carelessly in the world have asked me: “We have wives and are beset with social cares, and how can we lead the solitary life?” I replied to them: “Do all the good you can; do not speak evil of anyone; do not steal from anyone; do not hate anyone; do not be absent from the divine services; be compassionate to the needy; do not offend anyone; do not wreck another man’s domestic happiness, and be content with what you own wives can give you. If you behave in this way, you will not be far from the Kingdom of Heaven.’
I really don’t intend to channel Fr. Stephen day-by-day. You can subscribe yourself, after all. I don’t even intend to have Orthodox testimonials as a regular feature. That’s a worthy goal, but I bring nothing unique to such efforts.
But for the second day in a row Fr. Stephen has hit it out of the park, contrasting the Orthodox view of salvation to views common today – a theme that “recurs because it is so fundamental to the Christian faith and is at the same time largely unknown in our modern world.” Indeed it is.
Reduced to aphorism, the Orthodox view is that “Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live.”
We have a problem that is rooted in the very nature of our existence, not in our behavior. We behave badly because of a prior problem. Good behavior will not correct the problem.
The sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit view that Christ indeed came to make bad men good strikes me as a variety of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
It is the deism that distinguishes the non-Orthodox view at issue today from the view that Christ came to secure the forensic declaration of our righteousness so we could get into heaven. This view I know first-hand to be common among evangelicals, fundamentalists and Calvinists – all of which I arguably have been in the past, though I would have denied being a fundamentalist.
Among the ramifications of the Orthodox view are some interesting comments Fr. Stephen makes about drinkin’ ‘n smokin’ and other fundy taboos.
Father Stephen posted Wednesday one of his best blogs in weeks, by my lights.
This one captured eloquently a big factor in my embrace of Orthodoxy: salvation as ontological change more than forensic transaction.
There is no denying that grace is a free gift and that it is the true means of our salvation. But what if our problem is not to be primarily understood in legal terms? What if that which needs saving about us is not our guilt before the law of God, but the ravages worked within our heart and life from the presence of sin and death? This is probably the point where many discussions about salvation fall apart. If one person has in mind primarily a forensic salvation (I go to heaven, I don’t go to hell), while the other is thinking primarily in terms of an ontological change (I am corrupted and dying and were I to go to heaven I’d still be corrupted and dying). The debate comes down to a question of whether we need a change of status (forensic) or a change within our very heart.
The italicized parts are Father Stephen’s eloquent expression of what hit me early on the road to Orthodoxy. It’s a lot of what kept me on that road, in fact.
When I was in my Christian boarding school, I was taught that salvation could be broken down into justification, sanctification and glorification – a dim and dumb reflection of the more glorious truth. I now tend to think that justification – in the stark forensic sense of God pronouncing me righteous – is all but meaningless if I don’t cooperate with Him in beginning to become righteous in fact, not in legal fiction. And remarkably enough, it doesn’t feel like some sort of living martyrdom. There’s real, deep joy in the journey.
Unless I do get to work on becoming conformed to His image, becoming a “partaker of the divine nature,” I’d probably storm out of heaven, breaking a few plates or punching a hole in the wall on my way out, after spending my threescore and ten living entirely for myself and then finding out that heaven isn’t about me.
As Father Stephen puts it, “were I to go to heaven I’d still be corrupted and dying.” And I’ll make life a bit more nasty, and Christianity of my sort more distasteful, as I experience corruption and dying here, as poor Antsy McClain experienced one day:
Don’t miss his second (of three) potent points:
The life of grace is central to our existence as Christians and must not become secularized. In a secular understanding, the Church has a role to play in a larger scheme of things (the secular world).
No, the secular world is passing away. The Church is “the larger scheme of things.”
Can you identify the third major point? It’s the one I’ve been slowest making habitual to my thought patterns. I get about half of it, and I’m starting to get the other half. Maybe other people grasp it more readily.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 