Orthodox Christianity

December 5, 2004
Third Sunday of Advent

Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings

In the summer of the year 49, Paul departed from Philippi, the first city in Europe where he founded a church. He left Luke there to pastor this new congregation, but Silas and (it would seem) Timothy came with him as he proceeded southwest along the Egnatian Road, one of the great arteries that held the Roman Empire together.

A day or two and some thirty miles later, Paul’s party came to Amphipolis (Acts 17:1), about 3 miles inland from the sea, at the point where, Herodotus tells us (History 7.114), the Persian emperor Xerxes had crossed the River Strymon in 480 BC on his way down to the Battle of Thermopylae. As Paul and Silas came near Amphipolis, they could not help but notice beside the road the large statue of a lion that had already stood in that place for nearly 500 years. It was a monument erected there to commemorate the victory of the Athenians over the Edoni in 437 BC, and today’s visitors to northern Greece still stop to admire and photograph it, almost two and a half millennia after that battle.
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November 28, 2004 Second Sunday of Advent, Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings

When the Apostle Paul lists faith, hope, and love as the triad of things that “abide,” he takes care to assert, “the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). This superiority of love within the standard Pauline triad seems noteworthy in two ways.

First, there is the stark fact that Paul accords the supremacy to love, not faith. Let me suggest that if Paul had not made this point explicitly, there is reason to suspect that certain later readers of his epistles might have concluded, “and the greatest of these is faith.” My speculation here is justified by the plain fact that some of Paul’s later readers really did attempt to condense his teaching on justification by coining the expression “faith alone.” Pressed on the point, of course, those same students of Paul explained that real faith, living Christian faith, necessarily includes love. Love, thus, is subsumed into their full definition of faith.
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Upstream James asked about the scriptural passage concerning the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham:

I’ve always wondered this about Abraham: if he would obey the command to slit the throat of his innocent son, how exactly are we to suppose he was able to discern the voice of God from the voice of Satan?

This also raises the question as to whether he obeyed God not because He was good but because He was powerful and if he would have obeyed the dictates of an equally omnipotent Fiend.

If the story is simply a parable and a myth, could not the moral have been better served through a less literal take on “sacrifice”?
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It may be the case that we have heard the plainest words of Holy Scripture so often that we no longer really hear them. A long but shallow acquaintance with the Bible’s most obvious teachings may serve sometimes to deflect, if not actually to dull, even the keen double-edged sword of God’s Word. We assume that the point of the divine will has already pierced its way into our hearts, whereas in truth we may have spent much of our lives dodging and deftly parrying the thrust of the blade.

Take, for example, the simple mandate to love our enemies. The thing could hardly be plainer: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you . . . But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? . . . And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?” (Luke 6:27,32,33).
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Fr. Patrick Reardon writes on the Touchstone Blog:

Two days ago James Kushiner included in this place his own criticism of the essay of Dr. Peter C. Bouteneff, “How Should Orthodox Christians Vote?” which was posted on Beliefnet. Boutneff’s very confused and confusing essay, we regret to say, has now been posted on the web page of The Orthodox Church in America. In response to it, other Orthodox Christians are weighing in. Yesterday Dr. Jonathan Chaves, professor of Chinese at The George Washington University, sent around to some friends the following sage comment, which he has given us permission to post here:

My take would be this: This essay is yet another example of the false “angelism” that afflicts so many of our contemporary intellectuals: “you can’t pin me down, I’m above the polarities of the moment.” But there is no “above;” at this point in history, the ideas that activate conservatives, certainly the traditionalist conservatives, are grounded ultimately in the great Christian heritage; contemporary liberalism is equally grounded in the Enlightenment and its essentially anti-Christian conception of human nature. A believing Christian today will have a very tough time accommodating to the current liberal doctrines, and will find that to do so will eventually necessitate relinquishing one Christian teaching after another.

September 26, 2004
Feast of St. John the Evangelist

For three and a half days the slain bodies of God’s two faithful witnesses will lie unburied, we are told, “in the street of the great city which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified” (Revelation 11:8-9). The biblical prophets wrote of Sodom (Isaiah 1:10; 3:9) and Egypt (Ezekiel 23:3,8,19,27) as metaphors for rebellious societies, but it is the joining of these two images in Revelation that seems especially significant.
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