Year: 2018

Holy Trinity Seminary
Jordanville, New York
March 7 – 9, 2019

This three-day conference focuses on the application of Orthodox teachings on anthropology and morality to contemporary challenges posed by secular American culture (even within the Church). It will include both scholarly and pastoral perspectives, with the goal of articulating the application of Orthodox Tradition and apologetics to current needs, in the face of current social trends regarding sex, body, and human nature. It seeks to do so in a prayerful and traditional framework, out of compassion for both struggling Orthodox Christians and families, and those of our neighbors facing spiritual shipwreck in our culture today.

Planning on attending? Please note:

The planning committee encourages attendants, in lieu of a set conference fee, to donate generously to the monastery and seminary, to help offset costs of hosting the conference and to support their blessed work.

On-site accommodations will be of limited availability for a fee, and donations will be needed for noonday meals. Other accommodations are available in neighboring towns such as Herkimer, Richfield Springs, and Cooperstown.

For more information, please contact: JordanvilleConference2019@gmail.com

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Metropolitan Kallistos (Timothy) Ware

Please Note: This article by Reader Dr. Alfred Kentigern Siewers is a reprint that was first published on “Another City” website. Since “Another City” does not allow comments on their articles, discussion, comments, and requests for clarifications can be made here. All comments will be moderated. No comments that engage in left-leaning moral shaming or that rise no higher than the precepts of identity politics will be allowed. Respect for all contributors is required.

Sexual identities, in contrast to sexual practices or passions, are a relatively new concept. Only recently were passions taken to define people, i.e. seen as constituting an identity or essence, such as homosexual or heterosexual—an understanding that even many secular circles now scorn as untenable. It is, then, discouraging to see a highly respected Orthodox hierarch dare to breach the unwavering moral tradition of the Church based upon such an “essentialist” notion of “sexual orientation.” Siewers argues that this step undermines Orthodox anthropology by turning the body into a thing (reification) and alienating humanity from the incarnation of the God-man Christ.

By Reader Dr. Alfred Kentigern Siewers

St. John of Kronstadt wrote: “Never confuse the person, formed in the image of God, with the evil that is in him, because evil is but a chance misfortune, illness, a devilish reverie. But the very essence of the person is the image of God, and this remains in him despite every disfigurement.”

In his recent online essay embracing a secular model of essentialist sexuality, the retired Metropolitan Kallistos Ware unfortunately engages in rhetoric that does exactly what St. John and holy elders and saints and Church Fathers and Scripture and canons of the Church warn against: Confusing and identifying sexual passions of all types with the man made according to the Person of Jesus Christ.

Outmoded Sexual Models

Sadly, in light of his many talents and achievements, Metropolitan Kallistos’ latest writing echoes the secular culture and class of his own Anglo-convert culture more than global Orthodox tradition.

As a result, his intellectual exploration also seems quaintly old-fashioned now by secular academic standards. The educated elites of the affluent developed world in queer studies have moved on to transgenderism and pansexualism and polyamory, far beyond the example of bourgeois, monogamous homosexuality he objectifies in suggesting changes in Orthodox ideas of marriage.

Within the Orthodox tradition of marriage and ascetic struggle, however, there is no room for a secular progressive wing to divide theology from her anthropology, and no accommodation is possible in her soteriology for a reactionary consumerist view indulging the passions.

Yet both extremes of elite modern Western culture seem present in his view of identity, which seems headed in a direction both neoliberal and nihilist at the same time. Such musings will only help inspire schism and heterodoxy, the bitter fruits of those who would cynically use this previously respected writer and thinker as cover for political strategies to undermine Church tradition.

Nor does such questioning of tradition from a privileged, Anglocentric position take into account the struggle of Orthodox Christian parents and families and parishes globally, amid a nihilistic sexual revolution that undoubtedly has only intensified since his experience of being a lay person decades ago. While Orthodox young people today may need to prepare for a catacomb Church and cultural gulags, he raises academic questions that others likely will carry forward to a schismatic “Living Church” of Western Sergianism, replacing transfigurative holy tradition with a neocolonial formalist traditionalism.

Ironically, some in the West who try to change the Church’s moral teachings on sex have accused those defending them of being ascetically-minded, overly-zealous converts who objectify sex in ethnocentric ways. Yet Metropolitan Kallistos is an English convert and celibate priest who now regretfully seems to be doing just that.

Secular “Natural Law”

This is because his old-style Anglican scholasticism proceeds from a sense of natural law embedded in secularized Western rather than Orthodox tradition. In his writing, passions of sexual orientation become natural and not the result of the Fall. Thus, passions must be God’s creation and therefore accommodated as an essential identity, rather than realizing natural law to be the transfigurative logoi or energies of God, as St. Maximos the Confessor described. These operate not as natures or essences, but through ascetic struggle in synergy with grace: The spark of divine love in the heart, as bioethicist Reader Herman Engelhardt calls it.

Most striking is the absence in Metropolitan Kallistos’ article of any sense of both the transfigurative beauty of the embodied iconography of male and female in an Orthodox sense, and the life-changing, noetic life of the Church in theosis with the uncreated energies through ascetic struggle and grace. Instead, through leading rhetorical questions, he merely points to a heterodox anthropology of watered-down contemporary culture in the guise of Orthodoxy with a Ruskinesque tinge, unhelpful to the struggling families of faithful today.

It is as if he adapts Aristotelian-based Scholasticism to the sexual revolution, in lining up the four imagined causes of same-sex identity—material, efficient, formal, and final—to argue for essentialized sexual identity as “natural,” although such an approach would be questioned even by many queer theorists today.

The Noetic Life of the Church

By contrast, St. Maximos considered such essentialisms (including heterosexuality) as expressive of divisions needing to be overcome in theosis. In Orthodoxy, any identity of sexuality, however “customized,” must be understood as an effect of the Fall: A departure both from the formal cause of man in the transfigurative logoi or divine energies, and from the final cause in theosis.

In Christ there is neither male nor female, as the Apostle Paul wrote. But there is still preservation too, in a mysterious sense, of the spiritual beauty of the embodied iconography of male and female from Genesis, ultimately exemplified in our Lord Jesus Christ and the Most Holy Theotokos, and the Lamb and His Bride, the Church.

In contrast, Metropolitan Kallistos is following a road that some academics claiming to be Orthodox have already traveled farther, mimicking liberal Episcopalian and Catholic intellectuals before them, lured by will o’ the wisps of sexual revolution, that ultimately serve demonic forces in objectifying human beings to their destruction.

Such gnostic Scholastic “theologians” ignore without compassion the Orthodox faithful, including parents and young people, struggling to maintain the standard of Orthodoxy, by offering a theology separated from anthropology, sundering their integration in the Christology of the Fathers.

It is the promotion and celebration of any essentialized sexual identities based on the passions—heterosexual, homosexual, transgender, or pansexual—that deny man’s embodied nature in relation to Christ as the source of our personhood. This is the great challenge to Orthodoxy in our day, as were Gnosticism, Arianism, Sabellianism, Monothyletism etc. in earlier ages; yet it recapitulates aspects of those earlier heresies as well.

False Personalism

Sexual identitiisms wander away from Orthodoxy by subscribing to a false personalism based in human self-will, which Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos warned against in his commentary on the documents of the gathering of bishops on Crete in 2016. The latter reflected a confused personalistic philosophy ardently taken up with zeal by academics affiliated with the Phanar today, including now sadly Metropolitan Kallistos.

Glorification of self-will brings denial of man’s embodied nature and identity in relationship with the Person of Christ the God-man. It partakes of the spirit of the Antichrist, which, as Scripture warns, argues that Christ did not come in the flesh. It would try to make Him a disembodied concept of identity as the basis for a “new anthropology” of ultrahumanism and posthumanism, disregarding the Incarnation and Christ’s two natures, human and divine, unconfused and undivided.

In today’s sexual culture, everyone supposedly becomes an idea of themselves, in whatever objectified identity, rather than an incarnate logos of the incarnate Logos. The metaphysical materialism of the age self-contradictory removes man further from an embodied state of grace, into a conceptual matrix, whose attempt at autonomous individualism finally ends in nihilistic self-destruction.

The heterodoxy at work in Metropolitan Kallistos’ new teaching is a now too-familiar neo-Gnosticism, seeking to turn the body into an object along with other people, and salvation into an intellectual exercise of the enlightened. That modern adaptation of ancient heresy has brought a heavy price for mankind in its effort to ravage Orthodox anthropology, emerging in tandem with systems of oppression that would try to set up the wills of an enlightened elite over the faithful and subdue the noetic life of the Church.

Conciliar Medicine

This anthropological heresy comes as a movement, but not through inspired Church Councils, rather via academics. Efforts to objectify sexual identity within the Church meanwhile belittle the faithful laity and would force them into a catacomb Church. Such efforts nurture a consumerist metaphysical materialism in which the body becomes only a manipulable object at the bidding of self-will and the passions. It serves the end of a technocratic class politically: Secular power and sensual excitement become their ultimate ideal, with pacification of the hoi polloi through false comfort serving as their modus operandi.

The Fifth and Sixth and Seventh Ecumenical Councils long ago offered antidotes for such confusion over the integration of Christology and anthropology in Orthodoxy. It is sad to see Metropolitan Kallistos, with such a gifted mind and talented pen, to which I owe much myself, waver into such heresy. We may pray that what he has lost as a philosopher he can regain as a beloved shepherd of the faithful, namely Orthodox dogma and faith.

Reader Dr. Alfred Kentigern Siewers is William E. Simon Visiting Research Fellow in Religion and Public Life at the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

The Touchstone Magazine 2018 Patriarchy Conference Registration is open! Discount ends this month.

By James Kushiner

Baseball has been called America’s pastime. Writers such as George Will have written of its transcendental aspects. Indeed, sports at their best can touch the transcendent. Were that not the case, the physical acts of baseball—batting and fielding practice—would suffice without ever playing a game. But the game is more than the sum of its physical parts, but for its meaning to emerge, an order of rules is necessary.

In my boyhood, neighborhood baseball games attracted boys who came not to just hit and catch a ball, but to play a game. And we knew there could be no real game without the basic rules, rules that we did not make up for ourselves.

Of course, we adapted the rules, depending on the number of players and the field of play available. Adaptations might include “pitcher’s hands out,” “right field foul,” and “no base stealing.” Adaptations were agreed upon before each game, so we always played by a set of rules.

Once in a while a lopsided game would end when the losing team started breaking rules—a base runner, for example, would leave the base line to avoid being tagged out, but then keep running away from defenders until he reached home plate, pretending he had just scored a run. We knew a game was over whenever “pretend baseball” started. It was their way of saying, “We quit.”

Knowing the real game was over, players on both teams might join in the faux-baseball shenanigans. Such pretend baseball lasted no more than a few minutes, for without rules it could not sustain much interest. Such “play” outside the real game may relieve frustrations and burn off excess energy, but we were under no illusions about the value of a real game versus that of the faux-play. No one would have left their homes for the park or field just to goof off and play pretend baseball. They might have left home for batting and fielding practice, but only if it was in preparation for a real game.

An organized ball game is to faux-play baseball what marital sex is to sex as it is currently being promoted. Sexual activity severed from both marriage and family formation is like baseball activity without a real game in view: the physical sensations may be the same, but they lack purpose other than a quick feel-good. It’s the difference between the meaning of a hook-up or one-night stand and the meaning of intercourse between a chaste man and wife who are deeply in love and open to having a family. One is merely orgasmic, the other romantic and marital. One is recreational, the other pro-creational.

George Gilder claimed in Men & Marriage (1986) that the orgy was part of a pattern in pre-Judeo-Christian human society that sanctioned a brief but contained explosion of sexual energy, but only to reinforce regulated sexual intercourse within an established marital order that endured.

Whatever the case may be, what we have now is essentially a sanctioned perpetual orgy for all comers. Even though many decline to take part in it, its energetic spirit of transgressive sexual chaos is hard to ignore. It poisons everything.

The Christian gospel preached to the pagan tribes included a mandate for a highly regulated sexual purity. The Judeo-Christian ideal of a “holy nation” had no place for the orgy, for sexual expression driven by mere lust:

For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles … (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5)

Today, many school boards, teachers, publishers, legislators, government authorities, and even church leaders are complicit in the anti-culture of faux-sexual intercourse. Yet its bitter fruit is becoming increasingly apparent in the growing list of sexual abusers. Many of the umpires abolished the rules years ago. But there is no excuse, for they knew the rules in their hearts. If only it were a mere game; casualties are coming in. The game should already be over. How much longer?

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The call to “dialogue” by the liberal Orthodox, particularly those that try to force Orthodoxy theology into the ideological framework of identity politics (feminism and homosexualism primarily) is fundamentally dishonest writes Fr. Lawrence Farley below. It’s not a call to dialogue at all but an attempt to force the Orthodox Church to capitulate to the dominant liberal culture. Fr. Lawrence writes, “Those inviting us to dialogue are not interested in ‘discerning God’s hand in contemporary life’, but simply in changing our minds.”

A point that Fr. Lawrence doesn’t mention is that the Christian communions that have adopted the positions that the liberal Orthodox want us to “dialogue” about are dying. Once a Christian communion becomes feminized it inevitably becomes homosexualized, and once it becomes homosexualized it becomes feminized. The pathologies work hand in hand and the result is decline and death. There is no exception to this rule.

Why don’t they become Episcopalian instead?

Source: No Other Foundation. Courtesy of Ancient Faith Ministries.

By Fr. Lawrence Farley

The term “dialogue” (along with its synonyms, “conversation” and “discussion” and “engagement”) seems to have taken its place alongside the proverbial terms “motherhood”, “apple pie”, and “the flag” as sacred and untouchable. It used to be that no one in their right mind would speak against this Trinity of American values, and now no one is allowed to suggest that anything bearing the sacred word “dialogue” should be viewed with suspicion. A commitment to dialogue is considered an essential part of civilization, and a sign of one’s tolerance, reasonableness, and open-mindedness. Anyone lacking a sufficient commitment to these modern virtues (the new Trinity of American values) is a fitting candidate for denunciation and insult. If you think this last sentiment is too strong, you probably do not own a computer or go online very much.

One could almost formulate a spiritual law that any site or online contribution which contains the D-word or its synonyms is pushing the same basic agenda. Take for example the site, “Orthodoxy in Dialogue” (with D-word prominently displayed) or the site “Public Orthodoxy” (which says that it “seeks to promote conversation by providing a forum for diverse perspectives on contemporary issues related to Orthodox Christianity”).  Like other liberal sites these are dedicated to the destruction of traditional Orthodox belief and praxis. Obviously no site hoping to gain traction among fellow-Orthodox will advertise this agenda and goal. Like all deconstructionist movements, other softer terms must be found—usually using multi-syllabic words, which is almost always a bad sign.

In the same way the Orthodox deconstructionists usually fudge or hide their actual agenda. I have seen this at work for quite a while. Take for example the work of the late and brilliant feminist Elizabeth Behr-Sigel. Like other Orthodox feminists of her vintage, she rarely came out and declared that her goal was the ordination of women priests. No. She was just asking questions, having a dialogue, promoting a conversation about a certain topic, engaging the modern world. In a paper given in 1976 entitled, “The Meaning of the Participation of Women in the Life of the Church” she ended with the plaintive cry, “[These] are questions on which some of us have already reflected deeply, while others are dimly aware of them, and they are questions which we Orthodox women gathered here wish to put before the Church, praying that the Spirit will guide her and will guide us in the right way. In the words of the psalmist we say, ‘Show us the way we must take!’” What humility and openness! She is not pushing towards a predetermined goal, only trying to discern the right way forward. Or consider her essay, “The Place of Women in the Church”: she ends her essay with the words, “On a problem like the ordination of women, might we not imagine different ‘helpful things’ that the local Churches could determine for themselves?…Would not such a pluralism of discipline [wherein some Orthodox churches ordained women and others did not] be compatible with the unity of faith and ecclesial communion?” She is just asking a question, after all, asking us to “imagine” certain things, not promoting an agenda.

From all this one might conclude that for Ms. Behr-Sigel the question was an open one. It is not so. She was as sure of her conviction that women should be ordained priests as I am sure (and as St. Paul was sure) that women should not. This is apparent from the rest of her writing, such as the place in the same essay in which she denounced St. Paul’s counsel in 1 Timothy 2 as “rabbinical exegesis”, and the Church’s “patriarchal” conceptions as “infecting Christian thinking”. The passages in St. Paul that meet with her approval (such as Galatians 3:28) she applauds (with exclamation marks) as “the Spirit clearing a new path through the thick forest of human prejudices!” Clearly Behr-Sigel had already made up her mind as to “the way we must take”, her disingenuous tentativeness notwithstanding. The posture of tentative questioning was not sincere or honest, nor was the proffered dialogue genuine. In this dialogue, all the retreat and reconsideration was to flow one way. Those holding to the historic Orthodox position would retreat from it, while those holding to the new reconstructed position would not retreat. The deconstructionists had no doubt of the truth of their convictions; the only question was how to advance their agenda. One is reminded of the aphorism of JFK: “You cannot negotiate with those who say ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable’”. As far as those committed to the reconstructed and revised order are concerned, their own convictions are not negotiable. It is the traditional Orthodox that are being invited to negotiate and to be willing to retreat from their positions.

One detects a certain common vocabulary in those inviting the retreat. Certain buzz-words recur: they speak of “patriarchy”, “sexism”, of the necessity of a “creative reimagining”. They speak (in the multi-syllabic terms mentioned above) of “an awareness of the multifaceted nature of truth that continues to be discovered and implemented over time through a process of prayer, creative reflection, and debate”, of “a pluralistic era which presents Christianity with new and unique challenges”, and attempt to “discern God’s hand in contemporary life”—as if the authors were not already sure of where God’s hand in contemporary life was to be found and were still trying to “discern” it. When one reduces the multi-syllabic rhetoric to words that a child could understand it translates as: “You must change your teaching to conform to ours. Our modern secular culture no longer accepts your views so you must change them to fit in with that secular culture”.

All this dialogue and open-mindedness to the secular values at odds with Orthodoxy is comparatively new. The Fathers did not open such dialogues with pagans or heretics. They did engage “the pluralistic era which presented them with new and unique challenges” of course, and the people who were in the forefront of this engagement are known by the name “the Apologists”. The Church did not withdraw from the secular society into a safe and holy huddle with the drawbridge pulled up behind them, but met the new and unique challenges head on, trying to convince and convert the world. They talked to pagans and even acknowledged that the pagans had got some things right. These things they were happy to claim as their own (one author called the process “plundering Egypt”). But the coincidence of agreement in some areas between Christian and pagan or between Christian and heretic did not make the Church open to learning from pagans or heretics. The Church was confident that (in the words of our contemporary Orthodox Liturgy) it had “found the true faith”, so that its task was to correct the world, not learn from it.   When Justin Martyr used the term “dialogue” (such as his “Dialogue with Trypho the Jew”) he was not investigating to see what he could learn from Judaism, but trying to convert his Jewish friend to Christianity. For Justin and for the Fathers generally, “dialogue” involved not openness to changing or abandoning one’s convictions, but civil and respectful debate in an attempt to help someone else change theirs.

The essential dishonesty of the contemporary dialogues can be seen in their choice of dialogue partners. The deconstructionists are happy to dialogue with the LGBQT community, and with feminists keen to denounce patriarchy and to ordain women. I am not aware of any enthusiasm for dialogue with, say, White Supremacists. That is because our liberal friends agree with the agendas of the gay and feminist communities and (quite properly) abhor that of the White Supremacists. I suggest that this consistent choice of dialogue partners reveals that the true goal of the liberal Orthodox proffering dialogue is not real give and take, but simple capitulation on the part of the conservatives. And ask yourself: has our decades-long dialogue with the liberal Protestant WCC resulted in a substantial shift of the member churches towards Orthodoxy or slowed their accelerating drift into greater theological liberalism? Has the dialogue with the feminists resulted in the reduction of any of their cherished anti-patriarchal convictions or in a greater appreciation of the Church’s traditional praxis? Not a bit, which proves the wisdom of JFK aphorism quoted above. Those inviting us to dialogue are not interested in “discerning God’s hand in contemporary life”, but simply in changing our minds. That is quite acceptable; I am happy to enter into civil debate with anyone. But honesty should compel us to make our true intentions and goals known.

Fr. Lawrence serves as pastor of St. Herman’s Orthodox Church in Langley, BC. He is also author of the Orthodox Bible Companion Series along with a number of other publications. Fr. Farley blogs at No Other Foundation.