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.

At Most Holy Theotokos Rescuer of the Perishing we want to return hope, purpose, meaning, and joy to the lives of our elderly.

The Background

About a year ago a few us got together to build an assisted living facility to take care of our Orthodox elderly. Any priest can tell you that some facilities are good and others aren’t but both lack something in common: spiritual care for the Orthodox client.

Priests visit our Orthodox faithful in these facilities but every priest knows that it is not enough. What if we could build a facility that offers liturgies and more, that might even one day have an Orthodox priest on staff? What if we could do something more than distract or entertain our depressed elderly? What if we could build a community — a fellowship — within the facility?

We want to return hope, purpose, meaning, and joy to the lives of our elderly. That’s why we are working to build Most Holy Theotokos Rescuer of the Perishing Assisted Living Facility in Clearwater, Florida.

How it go started is another story. Some Orthodox faithful were asked to visit a dying Orthodox man who had no family. They went and took care of him, and out of that experience the idea for an Orthodox facility was born. Read the story of Angelo, the man to whom the parishioners ministered: Learning from Evangelos. It opened our eyes to the great need that some of our elderly have.

The Need

We found an existing facility where the owner gave us four beds to start. We built a chapel. Orthodox believers receive the sacraments and many non-Orthodox clients attend the services as well. The depression and despair is lifting. Elderly clients are helping each other. We notice more conversation, more laughter, one person helping another in ways that were nonexistent when we first began.

Our plan is to buy the building outright. But first we need to raise money to for legal fees, inspections and other requirements before approval to purchase can be granted.

Can you help? Any amount brings us closer to our goal and you would be participating in something needful and lasting.

You can donate below. Donations are tax-deductible. Receipt will be sent via email.

Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse

Below is the appeal letter from Peter Schweitzer, the Director of Most Holy Theotokos Rescuer of the Perishing ALS.

[gview file=”https://www.aoiusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Appeal-letter.docx” height=”1100px”]

Simonopetra Monastery on Mt. Athos

Sometimes a book defies categorization or description for that matter. John McKinney’s “Hiking the Holy Mountain: Tales of Monks and Miracles on the Trails of Mount Athos, Greece” does those things and more. At first glance, one would think that this yet another mundane (and even boring) hiking guide to a remote locale. Yet, I can tell you that this work is not such a thing.

The southern Californian McKinney may have started out wanting to write about hiking a remote peninsula in northern Greece for its aesthetic natural appeal, but what he ended up with was through that experience finding a life journey which became entwined with the faith of these monks on that remote northern Greek peninsula. What started out to be another book on hiking the outdoors became a spiritual odyssey into self-discovery for the Los Angeles Times columnist John “The Trailmaster” McKinney.

Click image to order from Amazon

McKinney begins his book fittingly with a quotation from the Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton, “It is perhaps true that Athos is out of touch with our times, for more than any monastery in the Western world. But precisely because of this it has much to teach us, since our salvation consists not in keeping up with the times but in transcending them.” (McKinney, vi) It is precisely this antiquity with which McKinney links his experience and that of his son’s given the fact that we live in the digital age in which we see “icons” of the present age such as the iTunes icon (a music note in a circle) and Facebook icon (a plain white F on a blue background).

McKinney’s journey begins in the book by recounting his childhood growing up attending St. Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Los Angeles. Amidst all of the “Greek experience” of attending Divine Liturgy, Sunday School, and youth group activities, he tells us that he had a spiritual void and remained quite secular for most of his life with the Greek Orthodox experience having no more than at best a sentimental relativism to him. He was a nominal Greek Orthodox at best and even more of a skeptic.

Within that context, it is interesting to read of his incomprehension why anyone would leave the comforts “of the world” to live an inconvenient life of ascetic austerity on a mountain. All of this would be exacerbated by the Athonite ways of being on the Julian Calendar, reckoning time on a clock by Byzantine time, waking up at 2:45 am for church services, eating simplest meatless meals, and laboring at menial tasks around the monastery grounds while repeating all of the above day after day. Yet, within this routine of simplicity, he would come to be impressed and influenced by the interesting personalities of the monks who inhabited the twenty official monasteries and the multitude of other sketes (monastic communities, but not strictly an official monastic community).

In reading through McKinney’s book, it is more than a travelogue of hiking on a northern Greek peninsula which is sprinkled with monasteries. Rather, it is a spiritual chronicle of the journey of a man from a place in his life typified by secular religious nominalism into a vibrant encounter with the Divine. The author sees the world through an existential lens during its opening story narrative and gradually through a course of perceived miraculous events retools the author’s vision into a transcendental perspective.

To be sure, McKinney in this book gives tips on hiking the Holy Mountain of Athos. He even gives details about Athonite cuisine which is non-red meat, non-poultry meat, and non-pork. Foods on their regular dietary menu include gigantes (giant beans); in fact, he dedicates a whole chapter entitiled “I Love Gigantes.” These, however, seem peripheral to the essence of the literary work itself. This work is more a spiritual journal more than anything else.

McKinney sees Divine Providence as the architect of who had been placed in his life during this trip to Mt. Athos. Whether it be, the various monastics or a fellow pilgrim such as the pious Spiro, he is affected to the very core of his being by this experience. McKinney sees the Hand of God in the placing of these certain individuals in his life to redirect his path as it were.

McKinney relates eloquently about the images of sacred art that he at one time approached with aesthetic appreciation, but would later come to view them in transcendent terms. An example of this is his description of the breathtaking thirteenth-century iconographer Manuel Panselinos’ frescoes in the Protaton Church in Karyes which is the oldest church on Mt. Athos. In it in particular is Panselinos’ “Resurrection of Christ” iconic wall mural. McKinney writes, “Particularly mind-blowing is the way he painted the Resurrection. Jesus stands atop the broken doors of hell, its capacity to imprison souls now demolished; the keys to hell are wrecked. Looking way more powerful than any commando who’s kicked down a door to a terrorist stronghold and rescued hostages. Jesus leans forward to take Adam and Eve by the hand to lead them, to lead all humanity, out of the abyss.”

In spite of McKinney’s very limited Greek language proficiency skills, through the help of interpreters and basic human communication, he comes to understand the spiritual significance of “The Garden of the Virgin Mary” as Mt. Athos is known since no woman is said to have stepped foot on the peninsula in over a thousand years. Thus, Mt. Athos remains dedicated and devoted to the veneration of the Virgin Mary.

The author is also impacted by the accounts of personal holiness on the Holy Mountain. He is told of the story of the life of the Elder St. Paisios who died in the early 1990s. MaKinney writes about St. Paisios, “Elder Paisios became known on and off the mountain for his piety and wise counsel. He became a beacon of light for those in spiritual darkness, and legions of men walked down the trail to his hermitage to see him. By day he received the suffering men, counseled them on their mental, physical and spiritual illnesses, their broken marriages, their addictions to drugs and alcohol. He gave advice, emptied them of their pain and sorrows, filled them with hope and love for God. By night he prayed, long spiritual vigils that left him only two or three hours of sleep. Along with his full-time counseling practice, Elder Paisios made metal icons of the Theotokos. He gave these icons of the Holy Mother to visitors as a blessing and wrote books of wisdom, compiled into thick treasuries of his work.”

These are not the only transformations which take place in the life of McKinney. An Athonite monk would prophesy to him that if he prayed to St. Anna the Mother of the Theotokos that through her intercession to Christ that the McKinneys would be blessed with becoming parents of a son whom they should name Daniel. Through as series of seemingly Providential events through the gift of adoption that is exactly what happened.

McKinney’s book is at times long in the details of his perception of Athonite experience and how that impacted his life. Yet, it is precisely in that painstaking detail that we find the value of this work. As I previously mentioned, this is more of a spiritual journal more than anything else. It is well-worth the time it takes to read it whether one is an Eastern Orthodox Christian or not. It really speaks to the place of an ancient expression of Christianity and how it relates to the ever-changing complexities of modern-day life. I recommend this book to be added to your worthwhile reading list.

I close with McKinney’s own words, “We can find the Holy Spirit in a prayer, at the top of a mountain, or at the center of an icon. The Holy Spirit leads us, and we follow, on the trail between earth and heaven. The saints, the holy men and women in the icons, are our trail companions, our friends who help us along the way. They show us that we never hike alone.”

John G. Panagiotou is an Orthodox Christian theologian, scholar, and writer. He is a graduate of Wheeling Jesuit University and St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. Currently, he is completing his doctorate at Erskine Theological Seminary and he is Professor of New Testament and Greek at Cummins Theological Seminary.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Rod Dreher’s essay ‘Fundamentalism’ & ‘Dialogue’ (April 13, 2018) reprinted below examines the terms “fundamentalism” and “dialogue” and explains how progressives used them in other Christian communions to take over their organizations and subvert Christian teaching. The most obvious is the Episcopal Church but there are others.

We have seen this operating in Orthodox Circles as well. Back in 2014 Fr. Robert Arida wrote a turgid piece arguing for the homosexualization of the Orthodox Church. Outcry was swift including my response: Fr. Robert Arida: Why Don’t You Become Episcopalian? After my response was published I received phone calls from Fr. Arida’s former parishioners whom were pushed out because they objected to his pro-homosexual activism. He was never publicly reprimanded and his bishop remained silent. That’s not a good sign.

Progressives will attempt to silence the faithful, or worse, try to convince them that progressive values and Orthodox teachings are synonymous. They will pull two well worn tools out of their tool box: emotive language and public shaming. Emotive language is used to manipulate thought and public shaming is used to silence dissent. These self-styled elites want to enforce the moral norms that only they deem acceptable.

Much of the turmoil centers on homosexuality but keep this in mind: According to statistics from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), only about 1.7% of the population is homosexually active at any one time. Out of this 1.7%, 35% end up leaving the lifestyle. Ask any millennial today how many homosexuals exist and he will respond that probably 20% of the population is homosexual. He thinks this way because homosexuality is continually amplified in the media.

Of course the homosexual passion is not the problem here. Homosexual activism is. And homosexual activism seeks to conform Orthodox anthropology to the homosexual passion. It seeks to essentialize the passion, to see the passion as part of God’s design within His creation and assert that “God made me this way!” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Dreher writes that these tools were devastatingly effective. Good people were thrown overboard and the character and teachings of the communions changed. Yet the activist victories also unwittingly sounded the death knell for the communions that they took over. They did not expect their communions to die of course but some did and all the others are terminal. The same could happen to the Orthodox in America and Western Europe. Dreher warns:

There’s a very sophisticated game being played here. And quite a few honest, faithful Orthodox people are setting themselves up to be played. This fight has been late coming to the Orthodox Church, but it’s here, and those who wish for the Church to be faithful to what it knows to be true had better wise up to the tactics and the strategy of the progressives, and learn from the bitter experience of the small-o orthodox within Protestant churches and the Catholic Church. Some of us converts came into Orthodoxy not from Evangelicalism, but from more established churches that have been hollowed out to some degree by progressivism. We have seen this all before. We know how it ends.

The takeover of the Christian communions occurred because their leaders lost courage to stand for the things they once knew were true. They became vulnerable to the manipulations of the progressives who sought to retool the once venerable traditions into something more fashionable and self-serving. It ended up destroying those institutions. Our Orthodox Church in the West is not immune to the same manipulations and, God forbid, the same end result.

‘Fundamentalism’ & ‘Dialogue’

Source: The American Conservative. Reprinted with permission.

By Rod Dreher

Two of the most dodgy words in contemporary religious discourse are “fundamentalism” and “dialogue”. They don’t mean what they seem to mean; in fact, they are often used as a way to gain power.

To explain what I mean, consider that Marquette University, a Jesuit university, is holding a “Pride Prom” this weekend. When some outside the university angrily questioned what a Catholic university is doing sponsoring an LGBT dance, a university spokesman responded:

Notice the rhetoric here. Stolarski is justifying a Catholic university holding a dance for LGBT people by claiming that the university is actually being faithful to Catholic teaching by so doing. It’s like something from the Ministry of Truth. But that’s Catholic higher education for you in a lot of places today. You’ll recall the recent incident at which an orthodox Catholic undergraduate at the Dominican-run Providence College was made into a pariah for publicly agreeing with what the Catholic Church teaches about marriage and sexuality.

How does a religious institution — a college, a church, and so forth — get to this point? It often starts with “dialogue”. Who could be against dialogue? Just talking about things, right?

The problem is that there’s dialogue, and then there’s dialogue. By this time, within churches, orthodox/conservative people should have learned that calls for “dialogue” are almost always a strategic move by heterodox/liberal people to establish a beachhead from which to dislodge and defeat orthodoxy.

It works like this:

Progressives propose a dialogue about the role of LGBTs in the church. That’s fine. It’s an important topic. But what is really being proposed is not a talk about “how can LGBTs live faithful to church teaching in this culture, and how can the rest of the church help them do so while integrating them more closely into the life of the church?” That would be an important talk to have, challenging to everybody, and faithful to church teaching. 

But again, that’s not what’s being proposed. The end game, from the progressive side, is to achieve the goal of having the progressive position normalized within the church or church organization — and ultimately to have it replace the orthodox belief. The game is over the first time the parties sit down together if the dialogue is framed in such a way that the orthodox belief is up for debate. To enter into dialogue with others in the church on those terms is to surrender in principle what cannot be surrendered.

The battle is mostly won at that point by progressives. It’s just a matter of time before their view becomes the new orthodoxy. Once they have power, they make their view the new orthodoxy, on the grounds that justice requires it. As Richard John Neuhaus once observed, wherever orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.

If someone undertook to do a history of how orthodox Catholic teaching about homosexuality became heterodoxy at the ostensibly Catholic Marquette and Providence College, they would surely find that it began years, even decades earlier, with calls for “dialogue.” Eventually you end up hosting Pride Proms and demonizing those Catholics who disagree.

In the Orthodox Church, there are a couple of Orthodox grad students agitating for the acceptance and normalization of homosexuality within the Orthodox Church. Their website’s name is — surprise! — Orthodoxy in Dialogue. To be clear, dialogue is no bad thing in and of itself. But in this case, the “dialogue” sought is not one that helps LGBT Orthodox live faithfully by church teaching, and helping non-LGBT Orthodox help them to do so with charity. The only acceptable end result of this “dialogue” will be to marginalize the orthodox Orthodox within Orthodox institutions, and to stigmatize them. By pursuing “dialogue” framed this way, they co-opt the orthodox into their own displacement and diminishment.

Sometimes the progressives let their masks slip. This happened recently on Orthodoxy In Dialogue when the site published a cri de coeur (“I Will Not Be Silenced”) by a gay European man who labels himself “Orthodox Provocateur”. This week, OID’s editors confessed: “We Made A Mistake”. Excerpt:

On February 10 we published Nik Jovcic-Sas’ “Orthodox Provocateur: I Will Not Be Silenced” in good faith. Mr. Jovcic-Sas is a young Serbian Orthodox man living in the UK who devotes considerable time, effort, and resources to LGBTQ activism in some of the historically Orthodox countries of Eastern Europe. He often partners in this endeavour with Moldovan seminarian Ion Andronache, a husband and father of three small children.

In an editorial note at the end of his article we explained our decision to publish in this way:

With the publication of this article Orthodoxy in Dialogue recognizes the need for a complementary two-pronged approach to questions of sexual and gender diversity in human life: the theological effort to understand its place in the divine image and likeness, and the activist effort to ensure that all of God’s children enjoy the safety to thrive in private and public life.

Today we were dismayed to find the author’s Facebook page, Orthodox Provocateur, promoting the so-called “Orthodox Calendar.” This annual production combines homoerotic soft porn with Orthodox icons, clerical vestments, liturgical objects, the interior of churches, etc.

In no way does Orthodoxy in Dialogue wish to be associated, directly or indirectly, with the perpetuation of this sort of blasphemy. Our position is to explore possibilities for the sanctification of same-sex love, not to promote the carnality of same-sex desire or to conflate sexual desire in its fallenness with sacred images.

Accordingly we have removed the content from Mr. Jovcic-Sas’ article.

Go to that Facebook page, and you’ll see images that can only be described as demonic. It’s where this stuff inevitably goes if you give it space within the church. I saw it over and over when I was writing about the Catholic sex abuse scandal. Remember “St. Sebastian’s Angels”?  Because so many of the “arguments” in this “dialogue” are not arguments at all, but rather emotivist appeals, like this gay OID editor’s impassioned apologia for his transgender son. Excerpt:

Do I have all the theological answers? Ha, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. My own “transition” as the father of a transgender child is a never-ending journey of heart and soul in which I sometimes feel that I haven’t even taken the first step. Much less do I feel equipped to expatiate theologically or philosophically on why some persons simply must transition in order to go on living.

Let the full force of that sink in: In order to go on living.

But I do know this. Our Lord, God, and Saviour Jesus Christ, during His earthly life, reserved His condemnation for the following: the “moral” who judged others; the religiously self-righteous; those who thanked God for making them better than other people (you know what you can do with your “There, but for the grace of God…”); those who turned prayer and worship into a capitalist venture; and those who ignored the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the homeless, the foreigner, the lonely, the convict, the sick. In short, everyone whom the religious establishment deems “non-normative” comes to us as He Himself in disguise.

Beloved Masters, Fathers, monastics, brothers, sisters, theologians, and religious thinkers in the Orthodox Church: Until you have met my son face to face, looked into his eyes as through a window into his heart and soul, witnessed his love for the least of Christ’s brethren, listened—truly listened—to the story of his life, his need to be loved and welcomed by you, his reasons for transitioning to save his own life, you have nothing of value, or legitimacy, or authenticity, to say to him.

That is extremely manipulative language — but in a culture where emotivism has replaced rationality, it’s highly effective. The problem here is that if emotivism is the standard (“Do I have all the theological answers? Ha, I wouldn’t even know where to begin”), the only barrier to accepting anything is disgust. There would have been a time when the idea that Marquette would have sponsored a dance for LGBT students would have struck many Catholics involved in the dialogue as shocking, even disgusting. It no longer does. There would have been a time when laying a gay rights rainbow flag over an altar in a Catholic Church would have shocked and disgusted Catholics. Maybe it still does, but it happens here and there (for example). The Orthodoxy In Dialogue people may have been genuinely shocked and disgusted by what Orthodox Provocateur posted — I cannot know their minds — but it is certainly the case that OID having promoted the words and thoughts of this freak hurts the credibility of OID with the kind of unsuspecting conservatives and moderates they hope to draw into “dialogue”.

Mark my words: if OID gains traction within Orthodox institutions, and among Orthodox elites, it is simply a matter of time before the blasphemy of Orthodox Provocateur becomes if not mainstreamed, then moved within the category of the tolerable. All the necessary emotivist cant will be deployed to justify it. “Dialogue” is a tactic to move the Overton window — the frame of tolerable discourse — to the progressive side. Eventually those who profess what the Orthodox Church teaches to be true will be demonized as heretics, as the Providence College undergraduate discovered.

Let me be clear: there is an important dialogue to be had within the Orthodox Church about LGBT issues. But if actual moral-theological orthodoxy is up for debate, the dialogue is a trap, period. Orthodoxy In Dialogue said last fall that it has taken an editorial position to publish frequently about homosexuality, arguing for its normalization and affirmation within the Orthodox Church. It says:

Orthodoxy in Dialogue promotes true dialogue, not an echo chamber.Dialogue presupposes that the voice of the Church and the mind of Christ can be truly discerned over time only when many voices have the freedom to express themselves without fear. Endless charges and counter-charges of heresy, apostasy, “liberalism,” “conservatism,” and equally endless calls for the excommunication of anyone and everyone who disagrees with us on any topic whatever—these serve no purpose but to tear to shreds the seamless garment of love that characterizes Christ’s true disciples, His Church and Body and Bride.

Thus we welcome articles that take positions opposite from the ones that we have already published. We have proactively solicited submissions from authors who we know disagree with our articles. Yet only one has graciously responded to our overtures; with him we are in the process of working on a joint project to be published in November or December. We invite others to follow suit.

I don’t know why others haven’t taken them up on the invitation, but I know why I wouldn’t: because to join this “dialogue” is to participate in a process that will ultimately attempt to legitimize heterodoxy, plain and simple. Theological truth on a subject that both Scripture and the Church fathers have spoken very clearly about will not be determined through some sort of Hegelian dialectic. Again, the right dialogue to have is on how all Orthodox Christians, gays and straight, can live out the Church’s authentic teaching, and help each other to live it out in charity. Anything else is a potential trap. If you don’t see how this process has worked to destabilize Mainline Protestant churches, and the Catholic Church, you’re blind.

I suppose that makes me a “fundamentalist.” Some Orthodox liberal recently denounced me as a former Evangelical, even though I have never been Evangelical. They have this mindset that any Orthodox convert who doesn’t believe in embracing the LGBT agenda within the Church simply has to be some sort of fundagelical yokel who can’t leave his hickish morality behind. The word “fundamentalist” has almost no stable meaning in common discourse, other than to designate religious people that one do not like. You’ll remember this week’s post in which we looked at sociologist George Yancey’s 2011 survey data, in which he polled philosophy professors to ask which category of person they would be unwilling to hire. Here’s what he found:

Who is a “fundamentalist”? I doubt many, if any, of these surveyed profs could tell you what a Christian fundamentalist is, historically speaking. It’s one of those scare words that people like to use to marginalize and delegitimize conservative Christians they don’t like (the movement conservative version of this is to designate wobbly right-wingers as “RINOs”).

In the discourse of the respectable, nobody likes fundamentalists. If you can label their position as “fundamentalist,” then you don’t have to take them seriously. Within American Orthodoxy, one often sees liberal Orthodox who wish to take the church in a more modernist direction denouncing as “fundamentalist” other Orthodox who oppose them. It’s a slur that is often tied to criticizing Evangelical converts to Orthodoxy — as if their theological orthodoxy on sexuality is somehow foreign to Orthodoxy, even though they affirm what the Orthodox Church teaches!

So, there’s an academic Orthodox conference coming up:

It will be interesting to read the papers this conference produces. In my limited experience in international Orthodoxy, it is true that there are some monks, bishops, and others, who have an extremely rigid interpretation of Orthodoxy, one that you might call fundamentalist, though again, I think the term has been so corrupted by political usage that it’s meaningless. The thing to watch out for is precisely that: the use of the term not to advance understanding, but rather to obscure it by labeling anti-modernist views within Orthodoxy as “fundamentalist”.

In an e-mail this morning, an Orthodox philosopher pointed to the Yancey findings and said:

These are facts worth bearing in mind when people sling around the term fundamentalist. It’s not just a derogatory term (like, say, stupid or backwards) — it’s a weapon that’s highly effective in stigmatizing people, especially in academic and professional settings.

There’s a very sophisticated game being played here. And quite a few honest, faithful Orthodox people are setting themselves up to be played. This fight has been late coming to the Orthodox Church, but it’s here, and those who wish for the Church to be faithful to what it knows to be true had better wise up to the tactics and the strategy of the progressives, and learn from the bitter experience of the small-o orthodox within Protestant churches and the Catholic Church. Some of us converts came into Orthodoxy not from Evangelicalism, but from more established churches that have been hollowed out to some degree by progressivism. We have seen this all before. We know how it ends.

Ask yourself: when has one of these “dialogues” ever resulted in church progressives abandoning their positions and agreeing with the orthodox? And ask yourself: where are the churches whose abandonment of orthodox teaching on sexuality has led to flourishing?

It has never happened. They don’t exist.

Icon of Christ Freeing the Prisoners of Dachau (Russian Orthodox Chapel located in Dachau)

Also read Dachau 1945: The Souls of All Are Aflame by Douglas Cramer.

By Gleb Alexandrovitch Rahr – Prisoner R (Russian)

Dachau concentration camp, April 27th, 1945

The last transport of prisoners arrives from Buchenwald. Of the 5,000 originally destined for Dachau, I was among the 1,300 who had survived the trip. Many were shot, some starved to death, while others died of typhus…

April 28th: I and my fellow prisoners can hear the bombardment of Munich taking place some 30 km from our concentration camp. As the sound of artillery approaches ever nearer from the west and the north, orders are given proscribing prisoners from leaving their barracks under any circumstances. SS-soldiers patrol the camp on motorcycles as machine guns are directed at us from the watch-towers, which surround the camp.

April 29th: The booming sound of artillery has been joined by the staccato bursts of machine gun fire. Shells whistle over the camp from all directions. Suddenly white flags appear on the towers – a sign of hope that the SS would surrender rather than shoot all prisoners and fight to the last man. Then, at about 6:00 p.m., a strange sound can be detected emanating from somewhere near the camp gate which swiftly increases in volume…

Finally all 32,600 prisoners join in the cry as the first American soldiers appear just behind the wire fence of the camp. After a short while electric power is turned off, the gates open and the American GIs make their entrance. As they stare wide-eyed at our lot, half-starved as we are and suffering from typhus and dysentery, they appear more like fifteen-year-old boys than battle-weary soldiers…

An international committee of prisoners is formed to take over the administration of the camp. Food from SS-stores is put at the disposal of the camp kitchen. A US military unit also contributes some provision, thereby providing me with my first opportunity to taste American corn. By order of an American officer radio-receivers are confiscated from “prominent Nazis” in the town of Dachau and distributed to the various national groups of prisoners. The news come in: Hitler has committed suicide, the Russians have taken Berlin, and German troops have surrendered in the South and in the North. But the fighting still rages in Austria and Czechoslovakia…

Naturally, I was ever cognizant of the fact that these momentous events were unfolding during Holy Week. But how could we mark it, other than through our silent, individual prayers? A fellow-prisoner and chief interpreter of the International prisoner’s committee, Boris F., paid a visit to my typhus-infested barrack “Block 27” to inform me that efforts were underway in conjunction with the Yugoslav and Greek National Prisoner’s Committees to arrange an Orthodox service for Easter day, May 6th.

There were Orthodox priests, deacons and a group of monks from Mount Athos among the prisoners. But there were no vestments, no books whatsoever, no icons, no candles, no prosphoras, no wine…

Efforts to acquire all these items from the Russian parish in Munich failed, as the Americans just could not locate anyone from that parish in the devastated city. Nevertheless, some of the problems could be solved: The approximately 400 Catholic priests detained in Dachau had been allowed to remain together in one barrack and recite mass every morning before going to work. They offered us Orthodox the use of their prayer room in “Block 26”, which was just across the road from my own “block”. The chapel was bare, save for a wooden table and a Czenstochowa icon of the Theotokos hanging on the wall above the table – an icon which had originated in Constantinople and was later brought to Belz in Galicia, where it was subsequently taken from the Orthodox by a Polish king. When the Russian Army drove Napoleon’s troops from Czenstochowa, however, the abbot of the Czenstochowa Monastery gave a copy of the icon to czar Alexander I, who placed it in the Kazan Cathedral in Saint-Petersburg where it was venerated until the Bolshevik seizure of power. A creative solution to the problem of the vestments was also found. New linen towels were taken from the hospital of our former SS-guards. When sewn together lengthwise, two towels formed an epitrachilion and when sewn together at the ends they became an orarion. Red crosses, originally intended to be worn by the medical personnel of the SS-guards, were put on the towel-vestments.

On Easter Sunday, May 6th (April 23rd according to the Church calendar), – which ominously fell that year on Saint George the Victory-Bearer’s Day, Serbs, Greeks and Russians gathered at the Catholic Priests barrack. Although Russians comprised about 40 percent of the Dachau inmates, only a few managed to attend the service. By that time “repatriation officers” of the special “Smersh” units had arrived in Dachau by American military planes, and begun the process of erecting new lines of barbed wire for the purpose of isolating Soviet citizens from the rest of the prisoners, which was the first step in preparing them for their eventual forced repatriation. In the entire history of the Orthodox Church there has probably never been an Easter service like the one at Dachau in 1945. Greek and Serbian priests together with a Serbian deacon adorned the make-shift “vestments” over their blue and gray-striped prisoners uniforms. Then they began to chant, changing from Greek to Slavonic, and then back again to Greek. The Easter Canon, the Easter Sticheras – everything was recited from memory. The Gospel – “In the beginning was the Word” – also from memory.

And finally, the Homily of Saint John Chrysostom – also from memory. A young Greek monk from the Holy Mountain stood up in front of us and recited it with such infectious enthusiasm that we shall never forget him as long as we live. Saint John Chrysostomos himself seemed to speak through him to us and to the rest of the world as well! Eighteen Orthodox priests and one deacon – most of whom were Serbs, participated in this unforgettable service. Like the sick man who had been lowered through the roof of a house and placed in front of the feet of Christ the Saviour, the Greek Archimandrite Meletios was carried on a stretcher into the chapel, where he remained prostrate for the duration of the service.

The priests who participated in the 1945 Dachau Easter service are commemorated at every Divine Service held in the Dachau Russian Orthodox Memorial Chapel, along with all Orthodox Christians, who lost their lives “at this place, or at another place of torture” (“na meste sem i v inykh mestakh mucheniya umuchennykh i ubiennykh”).The Dachau Resurrection-Chapel, which was constructed by a unit of the Russian Army’s Western Group of Forces just before their departure from Germany in August, 1994, is an exact replica of a North-Russian “tent-domed” (Shatrovyie) church or chapel. Behind the altar-table of the chapel is a large icon depicting angels opening the gates of the Dachau concentration camp and Christ Himself leading the prisoners to freedom. Today I would like to take the opportunity to ask you, Orthodox Christians all over the world, to pass on the names of fellow Orthodox who were imprisoned and died here in Dachau or in other Nazi concentration camps so that we can include them in our prayers. Should you ever come to Germany, be sure to visit our Russian Chapel on the site of the former concentration camp in Dachau and pray for all those who died “at this place, or at another place of torture”.

Russian Orthodox Memorial Chapel at Dachau (Click to see interior)

Khristos voskrese! Christos anesti! Christ has risen! El Messieh Qahm!