Orthodox Christianity

Patriarchal Declaration for Christmas 2007

OrthodoxyToday | Partriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople | Dec. 25, 2007
Christ is born, glorify Him; Christ comes from heaven, meet Him.

Beloved brothers and children in the Lord, It is with great joy that our Church calls us to glorify God for His loving and personal presence on earth in the divine-human hypostasis of Christ Jesus, one of the three persons of the Holy Trinity.

We must, therefore, examine very carefully the true and life-giving significance of the incarnation of the Son and Word of God. First, it reveals to humanity that God is personal and is made manifest to us as a person, just as He has also created us as persons. Second, it reveals to us that God embraces us with His love. [Read more…]

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What a Christian Bishop Should Be Like

OCANews.org | Fr. Thomas Hopko | Dec. 11, 2007

A St. Nicholas Day Reflection
The Orthodox Church’s main hymn (troparion/apolytikion) for the feast of St. Nicholas of Myra is the general hymn for all of the Church’s holy bishops. As such, for example, it is sung the day after the feast of St. Nicholas for the celebration of St. Ambrose of Milan. This hymn tells us what a Christian bishop (and, by extension, also a presbyter) ought to be for his people. And so it also tells us how all Christians should be. [Read more…]

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Communism is a Powerful Anti-Christian Heresy

Ultimate Things Communism Deadly Heresyby Dennis E. Engleman –

Throughout the Church age, the mystery of iniquity worked subtly and insidiously to foster unbelief. Satanically inspired humanism, which had received such impetus during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, reached its nihilistic nadir in the early twentieth century in the form of atheistic communism. The utopian ideology which is at the root of communism, and in fact of most secular thought, is seldom clearly realized even by its adherents; it has become part of the unexamined ideological inheritance of the post-Enlightenment era.

“One has to realize what communism is,” insisted Father Seraphim Rose. “Not merely a power-mad political regime, but an ideological-religious system whose aim is to overthrow and supplant all other systems, most of all Christianity. [Read more…]

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The Task of Orthodox Theology in America Today

OrthodoxNet.com | Fr. Alexander Schmemann | September 26, 1966

WHAT DO WE MEAN when we speak of the Orthodox theological task in America today? It is proper to begin with this question because the title of my paper may seem to suggest a theological orientation of which Orthodoxy is suspicious, but which seems to predominate in the West today. It is the reduction of theology to a given “situation” or “age,” a stress on “relevance” understood almost exclusively as a dependence of theology, its task, method and language on the “modern man” and his specifically modern “needs.”

From the beginning, therefore, we must emphasize that Orthodoxy rejects such a reduction of theology, whose first and eternal tasks is to search for Truth, not for relevance, for words “adequate to God” (theoprepeis logoi), not to man. Theology is truly relevant because it is truly Christian when it remains a scandal for the Jews, foolishness for the Greeks and is at odds with this world and its passing “cultures” and “modernities.”

[Read more…]

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