Theology

Osama is Dead. Now What Should I Feel?

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Source: OrthodoxyToday.org

Last night, like most of the world, I was captivated by the announcement that the President of the United States would be making a statement at 10:30 p.m. As I Tweeted this information, I added the line that this could not be good. Presidents do not often come on at 10:30 on a Sunday night to announce good news. So, like the rest of the world, I waited and watched the social media to try and find out what was going on. I will add a side note here that I almost went to bed!

News started to be leaked and then confirmed that the USA had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and that they were working on identification. This was a military operation and no U.S. military personnel were harmed in this operation. I will admit, I, like many others in the U.S. and around the world, rejoiced at this news. Rejoiced at the news that bin Laden was dead and the news that no Americans were hurt or killed in the operation.

I watched as Twitter and Facebook lit up with news and reactions. (The interesting thing is everything went quiet as POTUS began speaking.) People were thanking God and military that justice had been served. But what are we Christians to make of all of this? How are we supposed to react and feel about all of this? Some of the folks I follow on Twitter started sending out Tweets that made it sound like them came from Fortune Cookies. (I have never liked using one passage of Scripture to try and prove a point.) But it did get me thinking, and thinking. I went to bed and listened to the news coverage on the BBC World Service and eventually drifted off to sleep.

So in the light of day I had to ask myself this question: How do we, as Christians, balance our relief that the mastermind behind so much killing is dead and the fact that a human life, created in the image and likeness of God, has perished? My Orthodox Christianity teaches that God does not rejoice when one of His children is lost. One of the folks on Twitter said that we Christians should feel sorrow that we did not do enough to convert him to Christianity. Well, I will not go that far but I do understand the sentiment. I also had to remind myself that it is not our job to judge — that is and should be left to God. Again, my Orthodox faith teaches that we are all sinners and we will all be judged for our actions.

I have said this before: Each and every human has been created in the image and likeness of God. Because of our creation in that image and likeness, we are not born evil. Evil is something we learn and is a byproduct of the fallen nature of humanity. Our actions are sinful and evil but humanity is not evil. As an Orthodox Christian I also believe in the power of confession and reconciliation. One of the hardest concepts for some people to come to terms with is the fact that if we are truly sorry and repentant; God will forgive all of our sins no matter how horrible. What an amazing and loving God we have!

The difficulty is in rejoicing over the situation at hand. Are we rejoicing because a man is dead or are we rejoicing because justice has been accomplished? I will say that if we are rejoicing because a man is dead then our rejoicing is misplaced. As Christians we should never rejoice at someone’s death, especially a death of one who is lost. Justice being served, however, is a different story.

We can rejoice that justice has been served for the thousands of people who were murdered because of the actions of this one man. I remember the anger I felt watching the events of Sept. 11 and how I wanted revenge, how I wanted those responsible to pay. It was a very dark day spiritually for many, many people, including myself. I will also confess that I am not sure how I felt last night when I heard the news, but it felt wrong that I was happy. A man was dead and I was happy. This was not right! If we give in to this kind of retribution then we are no better than those who committed the act. If we rejoice because this man is dead, then spiritually a small part of us has died as well.

During the Divine Liturgy we pray for those who love us and those who hate us. Praying for people who love us is easy, praying for those who hate us is difficult, if not downright impossible, but we have to do it. We are called to pray for every person not just the ones we like.

This past week we remembered the events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. One of the most remarkable events took place whilst Jesus was on the Cross. He asked His Father to forgive those who had done this to Him! Think about it: Hanging on the Cross, Jesus asked God to forgive those who killed him. What an example He leaves for us. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

I am reminded of a Scripture passage from the Gospel of St. Matthew, “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist one who is evil … love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:38-39, 44). Hard words to hear but it is good for us to be reminded of them from time to time.

So what is a Christian to do? How are we to respond to this? Well, first, as with anything, we need to pray. We need to pray for all those who have lost their lives the last few days and we need to pray for those who put their lives on the line. The killing of this man will not be welcome news to many people and our troops are in harm’s way. We need to keep all of this in the proper perspective, be happy that justice has been done but we cannot and should not rejoice in the death of anyone. If we truly respect human life, then all life is sacred, not just the ones we like. We also need to pray that we can make some sense of all of this.

So is it possible to be happy and sad at the same time? I believe it is. The very human emotion I was feeling last night was joy that he was dead. The very Christian emotion I am feeling today in the light of day is one of sadness that a life is lost and a feeling of relief that the one who brought terror to so many has been brought to justice. The rest of what I am feeling will just have to work itself out.

Fr. Peter-Michael Prebble is an Orthodox priest in the Romanian Orthodox Diocese of America.

Read the entire article on the Huffington Post website (new window will open). Reprinted with permission.

V. Rev. Fr. Peter-Michael Preble is the Pastor of St. Michael’s Orthodox Christian Church in Southbridge, Massachusetts and the host of the Shepherd of Souls syndicated radio program. Visit Fr. Peter’s blog.

Humility, Prudence, and Earth Day

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Source: Acton Institute | John Couretas

At a World Council of Churches conference last year on the French-Swiss border, much was made of the “likelihood of mass population displacement” driven by climate change and the mass migration of people fleeing zones inundated by rising seas. While the WCC acknowledged that “there are no solid estimates” about the likely numbers of what it called climate refugees, that didn’t stop assembled experts from throwing out some guesses: 20 million, hundreds of millions, or 1 billion people.

The WCC bemoaned the fact that international bodies looking at the impending climate refugee crisis were not taking it seriously and, despite its own admission that the numbers of refugees were impossible to predict, called on these same international bodies to “put forward a credible alternative.”

The WCC did a thought experiment on the problem:

What kind of adaptation is relevant to migration? Sea walls? Cities on stilts? New canal systems? We need to start now to construct this future world. But we also need to imagine what it will mean if we fail. Indeed, it seems increasingly short-sighted to assume we will avoid sea-level rise or manage adaptive measures, given the tortuously slow progress of negotiations to date. We need to imagine that millions will, one day not too far away, be on the move, and we need to start thinking now about the appropriate way to manage this eventuality.

The main problem with this sort of thinking from religious groups on climate issues is not the lack of scientific credibility, which is bad enough, but their own credulousness. They have been all too willing to embrace any and all dire forecasts of environmental destruction, so long as it fits into their apocalyptic narrative. Maybe it’s their taste for catastrophe of biblical proportions.

Remember when, in 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared that 50 million people could become environmental refugees by 2010, as they fled the effects of climate change? They’d rather you didn’t. It turns out that the climate refugee problem is only the latest disaster-movie myth to be shattered. AsianCorrespondent.com reported earlier this month that “a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world.”

The fraudulent scare based on nonexistent climate refugees has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether the Earth’s atmosphere is warming, what may cause the warming, or what we should do about it. It speaks rather to too many religious groups’ gullibility for theories that line up with their anti-market economics, which undergird their blind faith in environmental doom. This is the “eco-justice” school of thought, which sees the market as “asserting the supremacy of economy over nature.” When people are factored in to this ideology, they are always helpless victims, not creators of economic wealth that has the potential of wide benefits.

Because of these shrill and unfounded warnings of ecological collapse, religious leaders and those who look to them for guidance are increasingly tuning out on the climate change scare. A new survey of Protestant pastors shows that 60 percent disagree with the statement that global warming is real and man-made, up from 48 percent two years ago. These results are in line with an October 2010 Pew Research Center poll which showed that belief in human-caused global warming had declined to 59 percent, down from 79 percent in 2006. Cry wolf often enough and you’ll find yourself alone at the next climate refugee conference.

Religious leaders should celebrate Earth Day 2011 by showing more humility in the face of the exceedingly complex scientific, public policy, and political questions bound up in environmental stewardship. A good start would be to drop any attempt at interpreting deep climatological data, which like complex policy or economic questions, is outside the usual competency of seminary training. Instead, religious leaders should focus on advancing an understanding of environmental stewardship that has a place both for productive economic activity and the beauty of God’s creation — without the Manichean split.

The virtue of prudence should lead us all to do more to reduce destructive man-made effects on the environment, with an eye toward improving the overall health of the air, water, and land that sustains us. De-carbonizing the economy, over time and in an orderly fashion, without wrecking economic life that likewise sustains us, is the reasonable way to do that. A strong market economy that creates the sort of wealth that can lead to practicable and affordable energy alternatives, free of the waste, abuse and cronyism that accompany government subsidies, will get us to a cleaner future faster than more “expert” management from Washington, the UN, or the WCC.

So let’s drop the nonsense about building cities on stilts to house a billion climate refugees. No more scare tactics, please. Environmental stewardship is too important to leave it to those who would drive more of the faithful into apathy and disinterest with their rash and incredible predictions of ecological doom.

Met. Hilarion: Life is given for us to exercise in virtue

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Homily on the Sunday of St. John Climacus, author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent.

Source: Department for External Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church

This book was written in the 7th century for the monks on Mount Sinai, but it is still relevant today. It presents the entire spiritual life of a Christian as a ladder of ascent to God. There are thirty stairs in it, each representing either rejection of a particular vice or acquisition of a particular virtue. The secret is that in one’s ascent on this ladder it is impossible to get rid of only one vice and to acquire only one virtue. One has to keep repeating one’s steps getting rid of each of one’s passion, sin and sinful habit and acquiring the virtues necessary for one to become a true Christian and to unite with Christ in the next life and to become a heir to the Heavenly Kingdom.

It is not in the same way and in the same order that all people get rid of vices and acquire virtues. And not everyone will be able to follow in the steps of St. John of the Ladder and to step over all the thirty stairs. But there in one thing that we all should know: life is given for us to exercise in virtue and to get rid of vices, sinful habits and inclinations. If the Lord lost hope for our reformation He would put an end to our earthly life to make us move into a different existence. If the Lord has patience for us here, on earth, it means that there is a hope for our reformation.

Therefore, if one has bad habits or inclinations one should use the time of one’s life to get rid of them. How he does it depends on himself. Everyone struggles with one’s passions in one’s own way. But the most terrible thing is one’s reluctance to struggle with them and getting accustomed to them when one says to oneself: I am as I am. I cannot become different because God has made me such. God has created each of us for us to grow in the life of virtue. Every day and many times a day the Lord gives us an opportunity for good works but we refuse it often due to our laziness, negligence, tiredness, faint-heartedness and weakness. Similarly the Lord gives each one a repeated opportunity to avoid evil deeds and thoughts and to get rid of sinful habits but we do not try to improve ourselves because of inertia or faint-heartedness.

The main task for each of us is to work to improve ourselves continually and daily, asking God’s help in this spiritual journey leading up to the Heavenly Kingdom. But how often we begin to try to improve others rather than ourselves! We wish to reform those around us because we think we believe them to be different from what they should be. And how difficult it is to make another person what we hope to see in him! But our aim is not to improve other people. We will be able to improve them only if we improve ourselves. We will be able to teach those around us to live the Christian life if only we live up virtues rather than talk about them.

It is not accidental that St. Seraphim of Sarov said: ‘Seek the spirit of peace and thousands around you will be saved’. Until we have the spirit of peace in our own selves, until we follow firmly the way of virtue leading up to the Heavenly Kingdom, we will not be able to prove anything to anybody or to teach anybody anything. We should live in the way that makes people say: This is a Christian. I would like to follow his example. It will be the most eloquent preaching.

Therefore, let us use the time of our earthly life, especially the Lenten days as a time for double abstention and double feat to exercise in virtues, to eradicate bad habits and to work to improve ourselves thus transforming people and the world around us. Let us pray to St. John Climacus that he may be our helper in this journey. Amen”.

What to Believe? – The soul-searching personal journeys of Bart Ehrman & James Berends [VIDEO]

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Source: Orthodox Christian Fellowship

Press release of the talk yesterday evening (February 17, 2011) and archived below.

CHAPEL HILL, NC – FEBRUARY 4, 2011 — The New York Times best-selling author Bart Ehrman and Eastern Orthodox priest James Berends will give a free public presentation at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 17, at the FedEx Global Education Center on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus. Ehrman and Berends, both of whom graduated from Wheaton College as Evangelical Christians in 1978 and 1979 respectively, will share their subsequent three-decade spiritual journeys for the forum: “What to Believe? An Internal Struggle.”

Graduating Wheaton College in 1978, Ehrman received a master’s degree in divinity and his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, pursuing a scholarly career in New Testament textual criticism. During that time, Berends did stints in ministry and industry between his two divinity degrees at Dallas Theological Seminary and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. Excerpts from Ehrman’s 2006 New York Times bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, provide a preview into the story of his personal journey.

“I kept reverting to my basic question. How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired?” said Ehrman in the introduction to his book. “These doubts both plagued me and drove me to dig deeper and deeper, to understand what the Bible really was.” Coming to the conclusion that the New Testament was not an inerrant document, because it was influenced and edited by the early “proto-orthodox” community, Ehrman eventually became agnostic. Berends also followed the historical record to the proto-orthodox community that participated in the formation of the New Testament; he, however, concluded that that community continues today in the Eastern Orthodox Church and that it promulgates an accurate rendering of the Christian message. Also like Ehrman, Berends’s journey loosened his grip on fundamentalist certainty.

“Bart is agnostic; I am apophatic,” said Berends. “In Eastern Orthodoxy, I found support for my uncertainty through apophatic theology, which emphasizes what we do not and cannot ever know about God, except through spiritual experience. Some say “when you’re uncertain, pound the podium harder.” My voice gets softer, and I will throw in an opposing opinion because I have to be intellectually honest.”

The event is sponsored by UNC’s Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies (CSEEES) and the UNC Orthodox Christian Fellowship (OCF).

Scroll to 36:36 for the start of the talk.

Fr. Hopko: 10 Essential Conditions for Coming to Know God’s Truth and Finding Life

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Fr. Thomas Hopko

By Fr. Thomas Hopko

1. The belief that the truth of things can be known, and the desire to know the truth and to do it, wherever it leads, is most essential. Indeed it is everything. When people have this desire and seek truth in order to do it, and are ready to do it whatever it takes to find it, know it and do it, God promises that they will find, and understand and live. In a sense, this desire and seeking is all that is necessary.

2. The seeking person must read the New Testament through, slowly and without judgment of details, at least two or three times, taking the time needed to do this. They should let go of what is not clear, and focus on what they can understand, what is clear to them. It would also be helpful to read a Psalm or two everyday.

3. The person must pray, as they can. If they claim to be Christian, at least somehow, they should say the Lord’s Prayer, and other prayers of the Church tradition, and attend Liturgical services, without serving or singing or reading. If they are not Christians, or are unsure, they must at least pray, “to whom it may concern,” saying something like, “if you are there, teach me, lead me, guide me…”

4. The person must eat good foods in moderation. A couple of days a week (like Wed and Fri) the person should fast; eating much less than usual. During this search the person should abstain from all alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Except a minimal amount of wine with meals. If overeating or drinking, smoking or drug-taking is a problem, the seeker must get formal help, like, for example, a 12 step program.

5. The person should abstain from all sexual activity unless they are married and expressing love (and not just having sex). There should be no TV or Internet porn. If sex is an addictive problem, they must take steps to get formal help.

6. The person should sit alone and still in silence for at least a half hour each day. They should watch their thoughts, but not engage them. They should say a very short prayer while doing them, to avoid engaging their thoughts.

7. The person should give at least a couple of hours a week to charitable work, and should give away some of their money (if they can) in a sacrificial way. They should do this, as far as possible, without anyone knowing what they are doing.

8. The person should open their life fully to at least one other trustworthy person, telling absolutely everything, without editing or hiding anything: their thoughts, dreams, temptations, actions, sins, fears, anxieties, etc.

9. The person must regularly talk with someone trustworthy specifically about their family of origin: their family history going back as far as possible, their childhood, relations with their parents and grandparents and siblings, their spiritual and religious history, their sexual history, education, etc.

10. The person must find a community of friends with whom to struggle to know the truth and to find life. The search cannot be done alone. We need each other.

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