Month: February 2008

The appeal of Barak Obama, who, as far as I can tell, has no discernible ideas, puzzles some culture watchers and worries some even more (see Spengler over at the Asia Times for example). Fr. John Chagnon offers “One Possible Clue” on his blog “The Traveling Priest Chronicles.” Obama’s appeal, Fr. John suggests, might be that he taps into the desire for salvation that inevitably takes a political shape when secularism rules the day.

The current issue of Christian History & Biography magazine takes a look at Gnosticism, or what editors rightly label, “The Hunger for Secret Knowledge.” The issue features an article by Fr. John Behr, dean and professor of patristics at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, which describes how the “Great Church” in the apostolic age was able to discern the truth about the Christian faith despite the best efforts of the Gnostics.

Fr. John writes:

This [true] faith, according to Irenaeus, is found in the Scriptures and summarized in the Rule of Faith. The proof that this is the true faith is that the “Great Church” could point to a visible succession of teachers, presbyters, and bishops who taught the same things throughout the world: This is the teaching common to all the apostles and the churches founded by them. The leaders of many of these churches had been taught by the apostles themselves, or disciples of the apostles, and they “neither taught nor knew of anything like what these [heretics] rave about.”

This was an important defense of orthodox Christianity against the Gnostic teachers. If the apostles were going to entrust the truth about Jesus to anyone, Irenaeus argued, they would have entrusted it to the same people to whom they entrusted the churches. They would not have charged some with caring for their flock and then secretly told hidden mysteries to others. In contrast to the Gnostics’ secret succession, the Great Church had a succession of teaching that was universal and public—and therefore more trustworthy.

In the same issue, author Philip Jenkins looks at the “long shelf life” of Gnosticism in “The Heresy that Wouldn’t Die.” Alas, the Gnostics are still with us. Jenkins notes that, “through a Gnostic lens, Christianity was transformed from a religion rooted in history to a form of inner psychological enlightenment.”

Twentieth-century Gnosticism took many forms, both inside and outside the churches. Overtly Gnostic ideas inspired many esoteric groups and new religious movements, especially those derived from the Theosophical movement. To take one example of a modern esoteric religion, Scientology offers an unabashedly Gnostic mythology of sleep, forgetting, and reawakening. Believers are taught to return to the vastly powerful spiritual state they once enjoyed, but lost when that original being was trapped in the deceptions of MEST (Matter, Energy, Space, Time). No less explicitly Gnostic are the later works of that latter-day prophet Philip K. Dick, in books such as VALIS (1981).

Psychology was also a major vehicle for Gnostic thought. Carl-Gustav Jung, as much a mystic as a therapist, drew extensively on ancient Gnostic thinkers and mythology in works like Seven Sermons to the Dead (1916). Fundamental Gnostic assumptions underlie many forms of contemporary therapy, which lead patients to recognize the Fall through which they became entrapped in the world of illusion and dependency. Patients must above all recover their memories, through which they can overcome the states of sleep, amnesia, and illusion that blight their lives. As for ancient Gnostics, troubled souls are lost in an alien material world, trying to find their way home, to remember their true identity. The Gnostic idea of salvation became the psychologist’s integration or individuation.

More than 500 people gathered at St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in suburban Detroit last week to hear Metropolitan Kallistos Ware deliver a talk on “The Future of Orthodoxy in the United States.” Metropolitan Ware’s visit was sponsored by St. Andrew House — Center for Orthodox Studies, also in Detroit.

The author of The Orthodox Church and The Orthodox Way told the assembly that “we must say the catholicity and universality of the church are more valuable, more fundamental than our national, ethnic, and cultural identity.” And, His Eminence added, “if the basis of the Church’s existence is life in the eucharist, it means that the church is organized on a territorial, and not on an ethnic principle.”

Ancient Faith Radio recorded the event. It was sponsored and hosted by St. Andrew House, A Pan Orthodox institution dedicated to Orthodox unity.

Listen to Metropolitan Kallistos (Timothy) Ware’s address:

Listen to the Question and Answer session:

I live in Amsterdam. For the geographically challenged — or for those who have spent too much time in an American high school — Amsterdam is in Holland. Holland is also called The Netherlands. This literally means “Low Lands”, which is why in French it is called the Pays Bays.

Low is the word to keep in mind when thinking of this land. There is a free market on sex. Drugs, some soft, and some bordering on hard (i.e., certain mushrooms) are tolerated, de facto legal really. Salaries are stifled (i.e., kept low) by an paternalistic tax regime. And the general culture here is currently competing with American popular culture to see which can slouch further and faster towards Gomorrah (in Robert Bork’s coinage).

Morality may be a least common denominator approach, live and let die may be the M.O. in all but aid for Africa, and the streets may look like a cross between Istanbul and Bunyan’s ‘Vanity Fair.’ But one thing is for certain, we are sure that we are healthier than ever.

And once we rid this place of smoking, we will be really healthier than ever.

Thus, instead of tackling problems that make Holland a burdensome place to live for a person of moderate Christian faith — or even a person of the general moral sentiments that Paul tells us are written on the heart — the Dutch have decided to ban smoking in restaurants, cafes, and hotels.

In July 2008 the whole Horeca (the collective name for Hotel-Restaurant-Café) will become smoke free. Those little uncivilized animals, smokers, if they still insist on smoking publicly, will be quarantined in a smoking room where no other services are allowed. Coffeeshops are the only stores not affected. Oh yes, I forgot, a coffeeshop here deals in marijuana, a cafe sells coffee. All this for workplace health and safety.

Let it be said that cigarette smoking kills 30 percent of lifetime smokers, be it through emphysema or lung cancer or heart problems. However, the Dutch government’s coming ban on smoking is not about smokers, it is about “passive smokers” who used to be called “second-hand smokers” who used to be called “non-smokers.” Ostensibly, the law is for the protection of this group in the workplace, that is oppressed by the acrid odor and carcinogens of smoke and thus endangered. From the rhetoric of the Dutch anti-smoking lobby, you would think there is now a shortage of Horeca workers because workplace smoke is offing them.

Perhaps there is some risk. Living with others is always negotiated risk; humans are dirty, dangerous animals. And part of our samen leven, our ‘life together’ is accepting some of that risk. But we must know whether there is an actual, serious risk or only a presumed risk. We do not want ideology packaged as science.

Those championing this ban assume that the science is settled and that what we now need is decisive action. It is not that simple, and the evidence is not as monolithic as the politicians (for example, do a careful read of the American Lung Association’s Second Hand Smoke Fact Sheet and its sources). Nevertheless, to paraphrase Belloc, let us never doubt what no one is sure about.

Instead, we must act. We must legislate.

That is the strong option, and a favorite of modern bureaucrats. But there used to be the soft option: culture. And some places still appeal to it. In sections of America, cultural changes in the perceptions of smoking have cleaned up the air in restaurants. Many Horeca now voluntarily forbid smoking. Most Americans believe that cigarette smoking is not something ons-sort does. There is an elitism that promotes health.

But as history shows, where culture fails government grows — or at least the laws increase. This is where we are in Holland. The worry is that through this we are legislating into existence a society that ostracizes the smoker but welcomes the junky — a society in which you are permitted to buy sex but not to smoke afterwards (as if in a brothel, smoking is the chief workplace health and safety issue!). Simply for the sake of irony, all Horeca in Holland should apply to become coffeeshops.

Address at the opening session of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, Geneva, 13 February 2008. Source: Europaica

I would like to draw your attention to the danger of liberal Christianity. The liberalization of moral standards, initiated by some Protestant and Anglican communities several decades ago and developing with ever-increasing speed, has now brought us to a situation where we can no longer preach one and the same code of moral conduct. We can no longer speak about Christian morality, because moral standards promoted by ‘traditional’ and ‘liberal’ Christians are markedly different, and the abyss between these two wings of contemporary Christianity is rapidly growing.

We are being told by some allegedly Christian leaders, who still bear the titles of Reverends and Most Reverends, that marriage between a woman and a man is no longer the only option for creating a Christian family, that there are other patterns, and that the church must be ‘inclusive’ enough to recognize alternative lifestyles and give them official and solemn blessing. We are being told that human life is no longer an unquestionable value, that it can be summarily aborted in the womb, or that one may have the right to interrupt it voluntarily, and that Christian ‘traditionalists’ should reconsider their standpoints in order to be in tune with modern developments. We are being told that abortion is acceptable, contraception is agreeable, and euthanasia is better still, and that the church must accommodate all these ‘values’ in the name of human rights.

What, then, is left of Christianity? In the confusing and disoriented world in which we live, where is the prophetic voice of Christians? What can we offer, or can we offer anything at all to the secular world, apart from what the secular world will offer to itself as a value system on which society should be built? Do we have our own value system which we should preach, or should we simply applaud every novelty in public morality which becomes fashionable in the secular society?

I would also like to draw your attention to the danger of a ‘politically correct’ Christianity, of a Christianity which not only so easily and readily surrenders itself to secular moral standards, but also participates in promoting value systems alien to Christian tradition.

We are facing a paradoxical situation. British secular politicians who share Christian convictions are concerned about the rising Christianophobia in the UK and initiate a debate on this issue in Parliament, calling for recognition of the country’s Christian identity. At the same time the primate of the Church of England calls for ‘a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law.’

I am sure I will be told that Christianity must become more tolerant and all-inclusive, that we Christians should no longer insist on our religion as being the only true faith, that we should learn how to adopt other value systems and standards. My question, however, is: when are we going to stop making Christianity politically correct and all-inclusive; why do we insist on accommodating every possible alternative to the centuries-old Christian tradition? Where is the limit, or is there no limit at all?

Many Christians worldwide look to Christian leaders in the hope that they will defend Christianity against the challenges that it faces. It is not our task to defend Sharia law, or to commend alternative lifestyles or to promote secular values. Our holy mission is to preach what Christ preached, to teach what the apostles taught and to propagate what the holy Fathers propagated. It is this witness which people are expecting of us.

I am convinced that liberal Christianity will not survive for a long time. A politically correct Christianity will die. We see already how liberal Christianity is falling apart and how the introduction of new moral norms leads to division, discord and confusion in some Christian communities. This process will continue, while traditional Christians, I believe, will consolidate their forces in order to protect the faith and moral teaching which the Lord gave, the Apostles preached and the Fathers preserved.