[…]
And then it says, “Lead us not not into temptation” [which] means, “Let us stand in the trials and the testings and the temptations of the final tribulation of the Anti-Christs, the sons of perdition, the men of lawlessness, the demonic age when the devil is let loose. Let us stand in that age, because that’s the last age. And let us not apostatize. Let us be faithful to Christ as Christ is, to God as God really is. Let us be real Christians. Let us be real members of Christ’s body as his Church. Let us not be heretical, schismatical apostates and perverts and perverting the very Gospel of Christ himself and saying all kinds of things in the name of God and Christ that are simply not true.”

“That’s the end of the world,” the professor said. And he said that he thought at that time, in the 1970s, it had not yet come.

So the question I would raise today, for us, in our conversation now: has it come? Is it now here? And, boy, oh boy, I can tell you folks, I’m really tempted to think that it is. I’m really tempted to think that it is. As one Russian Orthodox priest said to me a few years ago; he said, “What the prison camps and the barbed wire and the forced labor and the machine guns and the murderers and the executions of Christians could not accomplish, Western secularization will. It’ll kill the souls of people. In the name of freedom, they will revolt against Christ and against God himself. And they will change the Gospel.”

And so this priest told me; he said, “The Western investment, the computer chip, the drugs and alcohol, the discos, the porno—when that triumphs, and is even defended by Christians, when they kill their own kids in the womb, when they claim you should be free to marry anybody you want to, however many times and not even get married if you don’t want to, when bishops even, claiming to be bishops, could be married multiple times, and if they are married, they could be married to men if they’re men, and women if they’re women, and you have lesbian bishops and gay bishops and 13-times-married bishops, and people, sexually active and not-married bishops and all that, where you have the whole New Testament being [re-]written, where you have the divinity of Christ being denied, where you have the resurrection of Christ being denied, where the Church is nothing but an inclusive society where everybody can celebrate ‘life’ as they defined it—that’s going to be the end of the world. That’s the end of the age. That’s when you can know the end is really near.”

[…]

We should obey our Lord, who said, “When I come in glory, either at the moment of your personal death or at the end of the world, I want to find you repenting. I want to find you working. I want to find you weeping over the sins of the world and your own sins. I want to find you singing, ‘Alleluia’ to God.

I’ll buy that but it is still the absolutism of the relativist. “Do you believe that all morality is relative? Absolutely!”

There was no mention of “reparative therapies” in Fr Hans’s article. Why, then, are you asking about them?

It is true that Fr Hans suggested that “homosexual identity” is not fixed. Whether Father is right about that, I do not know. But simply saying that homosexual identity is something that can change and does change is not the same thing as saying that it is something that can be changed by some sort of technique. And simply saying that it can change is not an endorsement of any particular sort of therapy. You are reading far too much into what Fr Hans wrote.

I take Father’s point in that line to be simply that repentance is possible. Surely any Christian, and certainly any Orthodox Christian, would agree with that. If we are going to read something into what Father wrote, I should presume that he would say that the way to repentance for a Christian struggling with homosexuality is to use the traditional tools offered by the Church: the counsel of a wise spiritual father, prayer, fasting, and regular participation in the liturgical life and the sacraments (especially Confession) of the Church.

That is not what is usually meant by “reparative therapy,” although if you think about it, the Church’s spiritual tools deserve the name of “therapy” better than do the techniques that usually go by that name.

As for compassion, i was raised in the episcopal church. I watched it fall apart in the 1980’s and 90’s when the rot really set in. I watched thousands of people lose and leave everything they loved in more ways than one. Now I did not become Orthodox primarily because the TEC was going down the tubes, but how some “compassion” for the many thousands who have left the TEC and became Orthodox? What about their suffering? Wither shall we go?

As far as I can tell, the active participants on that list are really, theologically speaking, episcopallians (code-Unitarians). There is nothing distinctly Orthodox about their outlook, let alone distinctly Christian.

thank you, well said, Father, “false compassion” indeed. I would add: self serving false compassion. ..and no, your previous reply to David O. was not harsh at all and I would say to them: read the Gospel, it does not get harsher than that…