Bishop Savas Launching New Blog
July 20, 2009 by John Couretas ·
Bishop Savas, head of the Greek Orthodox Office of Society and Culture, is starting a new blog called Living in the LOGOSphere (no posts yet). He told Greek News that the new blog “will have a different, less personal, less whimsical character” than the travel diary blog he authored last year. Readers of the AOI Observer will recall that his blog greeting to the new president after last year’s election included this exclamation: This is the Day that the Lord has made!
The editorial focus on the new blog will range from “the political to the environmental, from bioethical issues to trends in popular culture,” the bishop says. A number of writers will be involved.
This is a positive development and welcomed here. Too much of what passes for “social witness” in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in recent years has been focused on the very mixed bag of “national issues” of the Greek state and constant collaboration with various and sundry Greek pols and bureaucrats. Defense of the Ecumenical Patriarchate against Turkish repression, certainly. Lobbying in Congress on the Macedonian “name issue,” ridiculous.
We hope that by citing “bioethical issues” the bishop intends for his new blog to offer a strong defense of the sanctity of life. But we know that might get him in “Church and State” problems with Greek Orthodox politicians who would rather defend a party platform than defend the unborn. We shall see.
Excerpt from Bishop Savas’ interview with Greek News:
Greek News: Please tell us something about your new office.
Bishop Savas: The Office of Church, Society and Culture is actually the revival and adaptation of the Department of Church and Society, which was an important part of the Archdiocese from the ‘60s through the 80’s. Archbishop Demetrios felt strongly about resurrecting that department to explore means of reaching out to the great numbers of Orthodox Christians who stand on the borders, as it were, of a full-blooded commitment to the Church.
You may recall that the theme of last year’s Clergy-Laity Congress in Washington, DC, was “Gather My People to My Home”. His Eminence and the Holy Eparchial Synod firmly believe that God has charged us to bring the world into the Church. To that end, my new directive is to promote a creative Orthodox Christian engagement with contemporary social and cultural realities. My office is charged with the task of developing and implementing programs and ministries that will assist those persons, and particularly young adults, who look to the Church for guidance in meeting the challenge of living lives that are both fully and authentically Greek Orthodox Christian and fully and authentically 21st-century American.
GN: I understand that one of the initiatives of your office is an upcoming blog.
BS: Yes. The word “blog”, of course, is a neologism, short for “weblog.” It’s a type of website with regular entries and that exists in a variety of types. I kept a personal, travel-diary-type blog when I spent two months in Florence, Italy, late last year, as a way of sharing my thoughts and experiences with friends and family. The blog I am preparing to launch for the Office of Church, Society and Culture will have a different, less personal, less whimsical character. It will provide commentary on a variety of topics that have an impact on our lives as contemporary Orthodox Christians in America, ranging from the political to the environmental, from bioethical issues to trends in popular culture. One of the things that sets a blog apart from say, a newsletter, is that it provides readers the opportunity to leave comments, to interact with the content. And I say “content” because it won’t be just text; it will include videos and podcasts as well.
GN: What’s the difference between this sort of engagement—on-line, with possibly controversial questions—and other forms of religious education or pastoral guidance offered by the church? What do you see as the advantages and risks of using blogs and social networking technologies to take our faith into the marketplace of ideas?
BS: Blogs and social network technologies are the new marketplace of ideas and we ignore them at our own risk. They are where people go, especially young people, to find out about their world. On the other hand, there are significant risks involved in engaging people on line. It’s no secret that a cultural war is raging all around us. We have become a very polarized society, and we’ve taken to shouting our differences at each other over the airwaves. Cybershouting is made easier by the fact that people can hide behind avatars or pseudonyms in cyberspace. In other words, they can snipe at others anonymously. So there’s a scary dimension to expressing yourself on the Internet because people don’t necessarily have to account for their behavior.
GN: How will you deal with the problem of masked identity on your blog?
BS: People will have to register with their real names. This might cramp some people’s style, but those are the people that we wouldn’t want to appear on the blog anyway. I’ll be the blog’s gatekeeper, as it were, giving thumbs up or thumbs down on whether a comment appears or not, so it’s not going to be a free-for-all.
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GN: What is the name of the blog?
BS: “Living in the Logosphere”. I’ve decided to call it that because I want to set this blog apart from the rough-and-tumble of the blogosphere, that virtual space where hundreds of millions of people are posting their opinions and reacting, often heatedly, to the opinions of others. I want the Logosphere to be a kind of metaphor for the Church. It’s where the Logos, the Word of God, the reason for everything, the Life of the world, reigns over all. It’s another way of saying “The Kingdom of God.”
GN: You mentioned that the blog will provide commentary on a wide range of topics, from politics to pop culture. Will you be addressing all of the topics personally?
BS: Mine won’t be the only voice you hear in “The Logosphere”. I’m the contributing editor, but there will be far better qualified voices than mine addressing topics like Church-State relations, bioethics, and green issues. My own expertise, such as it is, is on culture: film, literature, music, and that’s where I’ll largely be focusing my energies, evaluating what passes for entertainment today and helping people discern what is of lasting value or where dangers might lie. I am not a mindless kind of celebrant of whatever pop culture puts out there but neither am I a reflexive critic in the sense of being a denouncer who says “no good can come of this”, because I’ve experienced a lot of good from pop culture. I think that both ends of the spectrum are extreme and untenable positions; we have to have a more nuanced stand toward popular culture.
Let add to Fr Hans’ observation above (#47)–DStall you are making comments and critics about things that you clearly don’t understand and I suspect have never read.
For example, you reference to Vlachos’ work are a muddle of misunderstandings (and before you ask, I used Vlachos extensively in my doctoral dissertation and it was on the strength of my work that, I was ordained to the holy priesthood in the GOA without having to attend seminary): that the modern concept of person developed (partly) within the context the Christological and Trinitarian debates of the first centuries is true; that Vlachos criticize some aspects of western culture is also true. But he does not deny the personhood of non-Christians–nor would he, since he knows that all human being are created in the image of the Tri-Personal God and to do so would be an anthropological heresy.
Nor, I should add, does Vlachos reject (as you seem to do) the whole of western culture and science. For example in one of his works (Orthodox Psychotherapy?) he clearly states that he works closely with clinical psychologists because he values their scientific expertise.
The ability to cut and paste sources from the internet does not mean that you understand the material that you are quoting–in fact given the speed with which you respond, I am rather confident that you are simply parroting what others have said.
Regarding critical responses to Romanides , the best sources for this is to read Augustine and Aquinas–neither of whom I suspect you’ve read. For the record, the most that can be said of Romanides critic of scholasticism is that it represents a rejection of one, very narrow, very contemporary school of neo-scholasticism. To the best of my knowledge Romanides does not engage directly with the text of any seminal scholastic thinkers or even that matter with Aquinas in any substantive fashion; nor have you here. Nor does he (or you) seem aware of the VAST amount of material written by the non-scholastic by contemporaries of Aquinas (for example, Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Bernard of Clairvaux to name but three).
As for the development of science, or the lack of development in Byzantine culture, I am not certain where to begin so deep is your misunderstanding. You might want to read Stanley Jaki and his careful, well documented, historical work in tracing the development of science over several centuries and cultures beginning with the OT, continuing through the NT and the patristic era.
As for you claim that Byzantine culture was a deified culture, well, no sir that simply ain’t so. PERSONS are deified, cultures are not, nor can they be, since they have no real existence and (to the degree they can be identified at all) are merely intellectual abstractions.
What you have offered us here DStall is simply prejudice and ideology. Your criticisms of all things Western boarders on the Manichean (East, all good, West all bad) and (for the record) is NO WAY reflects anything that Metropolitan JONAH has said or written.
What value your criticism might have is undermined by your use of the technological fruits of a culture you condemn as poisoned. But I will leave that aside.
To be clear, I am not angry with you, but I am saddened by the things you say. You misconceptions reflect poorly not on you but on the pastoral and catechetic work of the Church. We have for too many years simply accepted a mindless and uncharitable criticism of all things Western. Shame not on DStall, but on us for our lack of discernment.
Brothers and Sisters, we have be content for too long to be satisfied with mere negation of the West and been dependent not on prayerful scholarship but slogans. Doing this is not only unworthy of our great calling but is an injustice to our Catholic and Protestant brothers and sisters and our fellow citizens. Worst of all, however, is that it sets the stages for our offering inquirers a stone instead of bread, a serpent when they ask for a fish.
My involvement here is my small attempt to do penance in my life for my own participation in our shared folly.
In Christ,
+FrG
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Fr. J.J., Luther taught that no “law” has the power to “save”(restore humanity to communion with God), that salvation does not come without reliance on God’s “grace” (Divine energies). What Luther stumbled over in Holy Writ was references to “works” not “law”, by which he failed to comprehend the Ascetic Ideal of the New Testament as expressed by St. Paul, something that seems to also be “missed” in the moral POV.
The moral POV seems to makes an idol of “law”, and “rates” sin (non-compliance with the law) as not so bad, bad, worse, worst, etc. something evident in Papism’s heirarchy of transgressions for which “atonement” must be made by way of penance. Such heirarchy of sin must be from whence comes the notion (from the moral POV) about abortion being untouchable and the “greatest” of “sins”, by which no other lack of communion with God (“sin”) can compare. Yet Holy Writ proclaims that All have “sinned” and fallen short of the Glory of God, not that some have sinned more than others. The Parable of the Vineyard also makes this clear, that someone who repents (be it from abortion or theft) and is saved just short of death will be saved alongside those that have spent an entire lifetime in spiritual warfare, struggling to maintain communion with God, who have refrained from abortion (among other transgressions).
The moral POV seems to see any equivalence between “sins” as an affront to its sacrosanctity of the human person which is considered “life” absolutely; in which no other Created form of life qualifies or need apply. Hence, murder (a synonym for abortion) is far greater than adultery, much less is theft, abuse of livestock, etc. etc. The moral POV worships what is “right” (“good”) and “wrong” (“bad”), a duality the moral POV sets up between two “opposing principles”. The moral POV then uses accusations of “moral relativism” and “moral equivalence” in rationalistic political debate in its exercise for will to power, to condemn those with whom it disagrees (such as Bishop Sava).
Power and judging are really the hidden (occult) objectives of the moral POV, often hidden even from those who indulge in it, but unfortunately, such is not power that “saves”, and such judging of others distracts those with moral POV from repentance over their own sin (which Met. Jonah makes clear in Spiritual Maturity is a sign of immaturity). Repentance is the basis for theosis (vision of God; “Blessed are the pure in heart (repentant) for they shall “see” God). Only vision of God (communion with God) saves. Only Divine energies that come by way of repentance (Path of Salvation, Ascetic Ideal) give a human the ability to “keep” the law. A thousand or more years of proclaiming moral law in the agora has not prevented the “progress” of Liberal Enlightenment (English or French) from proceeding to logical conclusions inherent in the philosophies on which such movement is based. Sentimentality for an earlier time in the history of Liberal Enlightenment culture when things were considered “christian” (not so “immoral”) may not be Oprahism, but certainly can be said to be Beaverism (as in Leave it to Beaver).
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Note 49.
So how were you raised?
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52: I was reared lovingly; I am raised by Divine Energies
My bio is on my site, the one for which you reported broken links, and wrote that you were finding some things of interest.
Why do you ask?
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Fr. G, I stand by your correction re: Vlachos. His work is a difficult read to say the least, so I’ll accept what you say without checking actual reference.
But the point about “person” is clearly that like the Most Holy Trinity, human “personhood” is relational and not moral. Immorality can break relations, but a sterile “morality first” POV does not restore relations, especially one that never manages to point to first principle for restoration: repentance(>DivineEnergies>FruitOfSpirit), and conveniently overlooks these “little” things.
I do not reject “the whole of western culture and science” as you seem to think. Neither do I uncritically accept what western culture and science dishes out (materialism; consumerism). What passes for “science” in modern western culture is actually “applied” science, science enslaved to “economics” of western business “funding” after the Prussian model of social “system”. Go back and read the links I “mindlessly” (in your opinion) “cut and pasted” in previous post.
Sorry if you feel inadequate because of my technical “efficiency”, but that’s not my spiritual problem.
RE: Romanides, go back and read the post links on Augustine. Aquinus attempted to reconcile “faith” and “science”, the duality that had already come to develop in Western rationalistic theology in his day. There is no such “split” in Orthodoxy. See interview with Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, audio on this page. Google for other works by him; his speciality is quantum mechanics.
I do not claim that Byzantine culture was deified, but that pagan Hellenism was transfigured into “new” Hellenism, i.e. Orthodox Christian culture. I also think that the whole creation will be transfigured, which is why St. Paul says it “groans” in anticipation of that event.
It is “uncharitable” of anyone who claims to be Orthodox Christian, to remain silent while their heterodox Brothers and Sisters are enslaved to distortions of their ancestors Orthodox Faith. Also see: England
Congratulations on wowing GOA with your scholastic prowess. You must be proud of yourself for “progressing” by Western standards far beyond the ignorant, muddled of the world, such as fishermen and me. BTW, just saw an episode of Natural Heroes that featured a Delaware fisherman who came up with a way to decrease use of horseshoe crab for commercial fish bait to preserve more of them so shorebirds would have more of their eggs on which to feed in order to migrate to the arctic. He expounded the benefits of his way of life, one of which was witnessing Divine power that he experiences daily in his life. He said it was hard to believe that anyone with such experiences could believe there wasn’t a god. But of course, he doesn’t live an academic life, subsidized by “faithful” and “diocese’, isn’t versed in Augustine or Aquinas, and omitted denouncing abortion, so what does he know and what “good” are he, or those crabs, shorebirds, ocean and sunset anyway (none of the latter being made in Divine Image), by comparison to the fetal elite, the measure of all “Life” in the Universe.
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Fr. G, I see that you identify yourself as an “independent scholar” and serve an OCA parish in OH. Since you slander my priest who is now deceased (Memory Eternal!) over your perceived lack of my proper academic spiritual formation, I request that you contact Met. Jonah, ask that he review all my posts including related links and my website, and that he contact me regarding how any of it “reflects anything that he has said or written” regarding Spiritual Maturity.
I also ask that you ask whether he thinks making such proclamations on the internet are a proper form of “penance” for you or any of the faithful in your care.
When Met. Jonah (Fr. Jonah then) was assigned to TX before becoming Met., he answered my email indicating that he remembered me and was interested in my work to convert family property to an Orthodox Christian intentional community. But of course, that never transpired because he was made Met. shortly thereafter. Also, please contemplate the Magnificat (the part about “lowly”, “rich” and “empty handed”) and this by St. John SF: “Significant portions of the Russians, who have gone abroad, belong to the intelligentsia [academics, scholastics, merchants, "upper" class] which in the last days before the revolution, lived according to the ideals of the West. Although they were children of the… Church, confessing themselves to be… [Christians], the people of that Class had in their world outlook [POV] strayed far from Orthodoxy. The main sin of these people was that their beliefs and way of life were not founded on the teachings of… [Ancient] faith. They try to reconcile the rules and teachings of the Church with their western habits and desires.
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Dstall:
Luther’s idea that works are opposed to faith understood the the term “works” to mean moral works. He juxtaposed moral effort against faith. That’s why he had trouble with the book of James which posits the exact opposite: faith is expressed through works.
St. Paul wrote that faith supersedes the “works of the law”, but Luther read this reference to law to mean a cosmic moral law, and not solely the Mosaic Law. It is on this basis Luther regarded James as the “epistle of straw.”
So, yes, Luther, although reading Paul correctly in that no law could save man, still misunderstood the nature and character of the law to which Paul referred, that is, the Mosaic law and not a cosmic moral law.
Looked at your bio and realized your logic only makes sense if I look at it in terms of “Lutheranized” Orthodoxy. It is why you (erroneously) concluded that Paul’s reference to the law referred to “Roman and pagan” law that I called you on upstream (note #47). Frankly, when I first I read your conclusion I saw it could arise only after first being filtered through a pre-existing (and still operative) category. Your conclusion could not, in other words, be lifted off the pages of the text without something else first being read into it — in this case the faith vs. works moral dichotomy of Luther. When I read you were raised Lutheran, the puzzle fit together.
So I can’t help but wonder if, despite all your protestations of Western corruption, that you aren’t the one still bound to the Western categories?
In any case, you get the last word and then this thread is closed. Feel free to post your website address and invite others to continue the debate there if you wish.
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“It is often assumed by scholars [aka "intelligentsia"] that whenever St. Paul refers to “the Law,” he is referring to Mosaic Law and the strictures of Pharisaic Judaism. This is, however, not the case”
Hermetic Cosmology and the Pauline Epistles: The ‘Birth of Gnosticism’. On Time and the Calendar in Orthodox Liturgical Theology: Some Historical Observations. Edward Moore, St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology
Per above source, what you accuse me of represents poor scholarship on your part, and your conclusions are Wrong. But based on past behavior, I expect you to simply discredit Edward Moore and St. Elias School as somehow not being “good” enough for your moral consideration, your reasoning being to discredit Every point made against moral POV without addressing any of them except something secondary you can nitpick. Your response is typical of the moral POV: find something with which to make a “straw man” that you can presume to “knock down” with wordy (false) “logic”, and thereby conclude “error” on basis of that one point alone so as not to address any of the actual points of discussion (such as Spiritual Maturity, The Ascetic Ideal, fetal elitism, or the Cosmic dimension of “salvation” that include all Creation, not just the human person, which in your moral POV seems to Only consist of the human fetus.) Such behavior seeks to distract from real matters at hand in order to deceive what is good and true, and is tantamount to quibbling over mint, anise, and cumin; over dotting “i”s and “t”s; while omitting weightier matters of Justice, Mercy, & Faith, the core of the “moral” law you so zealously seek for others to uphold, while failing to do so yourself, since you “weight” sins of others “worse” than your own. Such Double Standard is another hallmark of the moral POV. You root out my religious background in order to expose your presumption of “Lutheranized” Orthodoxy, without being forthcoming about your own background. Moral POV is obvious to those with “eyes to see” and “ears to hear”, and exhibition of the moral POV form of happiness-seeking sickness of religion as opposed to spiritual cure requires no knowledge of specific religious background of those who are sick with spiritual disease.
I know of no other Orthodox who refer to the so called Orthodox “moral tradition” or “moral imperative” except those who indulge in the moral POV while ignoring that God is Love at all times and never a Christianized humanistic type of “judge”. Orthodox Tradition incarnates primarily through the Ascetic Ideal, and as such cannot be simplistically condensed into “morality”. Furthermore it requires Both-And mode of thinking, not typical Western Either-Or dichotomies. The Most Holy Trinity (God) is Both-And, Transcendent-Imminent. Imminent not just in the human person but in All Creation as St. John Damascene proclaims.
I give the human fetus primacy in All Created Life, together with All Created Life, not in exclusion of it . I will include abortion, First! together with consumerist rape of Creation on my site, LifeGivingSpring.info, and will advocate such for OFT, whenever the same inclusive advocacy for pro-life is exhibited at the internet forums of moral POV, OrthodoxyToday.org, OCNet.com, and AOIusa.org, and the Ascetic Ideal (Spiritual Maturity, “cure”) is advocated there as well as the true (“moral”) Orthodox Church Tradition.
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OK. Thank you DStall. Thread is now closed.
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Thread closed completely.
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