This is a very thought provoking article, and a great read.
In regard to your statement that Christ's words should be interpreted as, “my beloved, it were better you had not been born into this wicked world whose Archon has twisted your love, but I will save you through death as I trample down death by death", I would revise them just a bit to read, “my beloved, it would have been better if you had merely been stillborn rather than to have been born into this wicked world whose Archon has twisted your love, but I will save you through death as I trample down death by death.”
In much of Christendom, Christ's words are understood to mean Judas must be damned for all eternity, and that universalism is therefore a heresy, as if universalism is true and Judas will one day ultimately be saved by the Christ who died to truly defeat death, hell and the devil for every creature, no matter what evil he did or experienced, it would certainly not have been better for him to have never been born, since he will ultimately experience never-ending bliss.
However, if the proper interpretation is, “my beloved, it would have been better if you had merely been stillborn rather than to have been born into this wicked world whose Archon has twisted your love, but I will save you through death as I trample down death by death", universalism can still be defended and held to, as a stillborn babe will also experience never-ending bliss, yet without ever doing wilfully evil, let alone selling their own loving Creator for 30 pieces of silver, as Judas did.
May God have mercy on ALL, and may we ALL always remember that God loves even those we consider "evil", far more than we could ever even love ourselves.
Dear Noah, I'm a french journalist writing about faith and spirituality. I'm writing now an article about conversions to orthodoxy for L ADN magazine. After reading your oieces about “orthobros”, I would like to interview you. Can I contact you by mail or you at marcbonomelli@gmail.com ? Your help would be very insightful!
It's important that we Christians frequently remind ourselves that God alone should be the object of our worship. Although few Christians will be tempted to worship statues, unfortunately, we have a bad habit of turning to various idols: for the Roman Catholic Church, this is often the Pope (and the Magisterium more broadly); for Protestants, the Bible itself easily becomes a small and portable deity; for the Orthodox, it seems to me, it is Tradition itself that often becomes an idol: a reification of nostalgia for a time that we modern humans never even experienced. (And of course we can easily mix and match these idols, and indeed, quite easily worship all three.)
Of course, neither of these three are somehow bad in themselves—the latter two are necessary pillars of Christian faith!—but if they come to replace God as the objects our worship (which I think they often do, though of course those who have stumbled in this way will deny it) then we are in deep trouble.
Indeed, I came across this error recently in a piece arguing against women's ordination: the argument really boiled down to little more than pointing out that the Church Fathers did not authorize women's ordination, and therefore it must be wrong. As if the Church Fathers are somehow without sin and never made any errors! (Surely, the Fathers worth listening to will have been precisely those quickest to confess their sinfulness.)
And this despite the undeniable fact that, *at minimum*, both Mary Magdalene and Junia were apostles (the latter having been identified as such explicitly by Paul; the former's status as the Apostle to the Apostle did not need to wait for episcopal approval in future centuries: anyone who reads John 20 with any integrity already knows it). Both the presbyterate and episcopate are nothint but the receiving of apostolic responsibility. If women were indeed apostles, how could they not serve as presbyters and bishops—people of much less importance than the apostles themselves? And this is to say nothing of the examples of both Deborah and Huldah from the Hebrew Bible, who clearly show that women's authority was, on occasion, even recognized in ancient times.
Now, I don't say any of this to argue that no one has ever raised any reasonable arguments against women's ordination—I won't pretend to have read everything of note on the subject, and perhaps there is some amazingly persuasive argument out there that I have not come across—but simply to drive home the simple point that we Christians often prefer to pretend Christianity supports our own selfishness rather than hear the radical call of Christ to a truly renewed life.
I guess the way I think of it, is more framed as, the church is anemic and sick, but this does not destroy the efficacy of the mysteries or the fact that just because many don’t get it, there is in the institutional church the power to still help in deification with the saints like st sophrony and paisios. I’m very weary to dismiss the institutional church but rather focus on the people who see themselves who are in it to whom Christ will say in the end I did not know you. The problem I think is automatically considering one who joins the church or even speaks of it as actually part of the church. Baptism offers us the power to enter into and be transformed to enter into the body of Christ but it is only giving us a capacity that must be actualized through the cultivation of virtue, purification, and illumination.
I mention this because a) there are many slowly changing in the church though they might yet meet our standards of enlightenment and more importantly the mysteries of the church are not lost in their efficacy just because of the failures of its leaders.
This is why I disagree in part with David Bentley hart’s criticism of institutional Christianity. Not because of the validity of many of his charges but because even when anemic and sick the institution of the church still preserves the capacity to open to people the kingdom of God. Hart essentially argues after the New Testament or Constantine everything was lost but if this is the case than are we supposed to let go of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximos?
My point is the people in any religion that gets big enough eventually will no longer represent that religion faithfully. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
I did not claim or imply anything about the sacraments being inefficacious, nor did I deny that the sacraments provide deification and are available through the institutional Church (Orthodox, Catholic, Miaphysite, etc.). Likewise, I did not claim that Church history after Constantine is to be thrown out (I am Orthodox), only that many parts of it must be excised from our beliefs in what it means for the Church to be the Church, because tradition is only ever truth (rather than mere habit, custom, or mindless accretion) when it is self-critical creativity informed by the eschaton. My own views here are modelled on DBH's (which are themselves part of Orthodox-Catholic dialogues not foreign to them) who, if you read his book on tradition, in no way says everything post-Constantine is to be thrown out. You continue to flagrantly mischaracterize him.
The above said, your conflation of my views with outright denial of sacramental efficacy manifests your own conflation of institutional structures with the deifying reality of the sacraments. They aren't the same thing, even if the structure is formed around the eucharist as its context, or put another way, the institution only participates in sacramental reality by the sacraments it performs. The institution does not generate them, God sends them and we receive. If one prefers talk of the "Church as pan-sacrament" then still the Church in this sense is NOT the institution, its Christ's eschatological body being manifest as anything sacred.
The confusion of institution with sacrament or as the super-sacred generator of the sacraments is where you then get the sacralization of the institute as coercive power and the doctrines of infallibility and unquestionable authority, which are simple ideological and institutional myth. More than that, this confusion neuters the ability of people like you to follow the example of the prophets and condemn the institution when it needs condemning. Not only does the Moscow Patriarchate as an institution need to be condemned today, not just Kyrill or individual priests and bishops, much of the whole Church structure and ideological self-understanding of Orthodoxy needs to be condemned or we will continue to call evil good. This isn't exaggeration, as I am sure you are well aware of the wicked nationalistic/fascistic/imperialistic histories and self-understandings held by many of the Orthodox jurisdictions, as well as the reality that Orthodox jurisdictions and bishops all relate to each other exactly like the rulers of the Gentiles of which Christ said "it shall not be so among you," and I could name many more things though we might disagree.
Lastly, do you even disagree with the understanding of living tradition as self-critical, even self-repudiating, creativity informed by the eschaton? Whenever I say or write something on this topic, or when DBH has, people always clutch their pearls, mischaracterize, and then give some toe the line "blame individuals not holy mother Church" answer, but all this looks like is coating a basically fundamentalist view of tradition and Church history in petty platitudes.
I'm sorry if it came across that I was saying that you personally did not believe in the mysteries, etc... I should have framed it much better. My point was not to antagonize or to misrepresent. My only point I think is not meant to be negative but constructive. Sorry if it came off so strongly before. The point I was trying to make, is that though the institutional church must be critiqued and we must identify when it goes astray, when we continue a certain form of rhetoric, it starts to appear as if the institutional church is the bad guy or irredeemable. All I meant to suggest was focusing the critique on the people who stray from the church and essentially though representing the church, say like even Metropolitan Krill, then we can see the Church and the institution as separate--as in my mind it should be--from those who would ruin it's image by not truly being Christian and twice the sons of the devil. I guess you don't like this, but I don't think either that the whole institution is fucked and terrible. Much of it is, but what changes would you make. Are we going to have democratic elections and let the mob rule? I think that the problem is as soon as you take an abstract category or idea (institution) and characterize it so negatively, it becomes hard for people to understand then what you do appreciate about the Church.
Also as a note, I did understand what Hart was getting at and in broad strokes his book has a truth at bottom that the event or apocalypse of Christ is never done inspiring us, it is an event that produces an infinite horizon of interpretation which can't allow for ossification. I am, I think, more sympathetic than you think. It's just for me at least, the echoing of Hart here, brought to mind the criticism I had of his book which I think is founded. He paints it black and white. Constantine wasn't a vicious mongrel nor was he probably a saint, but when he did become emperor there was in fact a number of changes he made which were rather beneficial too. The same can be said of so many more figures of church history. Obviously their are flaws which many seem to gloss over or excuse, but to go the route of totalizing the institution as completely flawed goes to far I think.
I didn't mean to spark an argument. I was just responding and hoping to understand more about what you mean, because, it seems you do agree with me, in some ways more than you think.
My apologies for responding as if you were being combative and misrepresenting me.
The institutional Church often is the bad guy, and whether it can be redeemed depends entirely on our ability to honestly condemn it and aspects of it so that they can be purged, instead of assuming institutional holiness and blaming individuals. This is on the surface equivalent to the problem of politics of whether one should condemn institutions/systems of power and call for radical change/re-evaluation or blame individual politicians while upholding the system as essentially good when "done right" or when the right person is in power. The difference is that the Church, if it is the eschatological reality of holiness and truth we believe it is, cannot be identified with any earthly system and must always critique/subvert/transcend such systems. The confusion of the eschaton with the institution is precisely the reduction of Church to earthly institution and of tradition to inertia (which may preserve custom but, as Bulgakov says, only evil grows by inertia).
Really, this confusion results in an attitude towards the Church indistinguishable from nationalist or even fascist political attitudes. It is characterized not only by authoritarianism and exceptionalism, but also the inherent uncomfortability with self-reflection and critique, fear of uncertainty and the other, etc., and so is motivated by all the same psychological complexes as the mentioned political stances. To use the Russian Church as an example, it is not merely Kyrill or any individual who is alone to blame, it is the institution of the Russian Church as such, its history, its organization and self-understanding, and its systems of power as it exists now making it what it is. As an institution it has to be condemned, and to be redeemed it requires vast change, and I hope you would agree with that.
You ask what changes I would make, and I do not know specifically when it comes to institutional structure. Those questions will need to be worked out ecumenically, though ideally I wish Christianity would move towards an understanding of itself as a people rather than competing institutional structures, a people made up of many diverse communities with much more local bishops, dropping the pretense of infallibility and coercive power, and which as a people would be able to have a general common vision of Godmanhood (or apokatastasis or Tikkun) for living in and transforming the world. The complexities of coming closer to this vision will though be subject to the whims of historical contingency as this vision would require ecumenical rapprochement, and so the negotiating of various communions.
As for what I do appreciate about the Church and its history, I appreciate those glimpses of the eschaton which are present in it, the martyrs and saints. I appreciate its philosophical and theological geniuses, and its doctrines (though not the violent enforcement of them nor their narrow interpretation). I also appreciate the many ways Christendom did impact world history and culture for the better, as DBH has also expressed in Tradition and Apocalypse and in various talks and articles (I simply do not think you accurately represent his stances). Do you think I should also appreciate the Church as a coercive power pitting bare authority against rationality and conscience?
I am not meaning to be rude in any of the above, I simply want to be clear as possible why or where we disagree.
Oh my! So much in this article I am going to need to print it out to fully answer but I took some notes so first question- where did you find the picture of the woodcarving ?!! It so perfectly illustrates what you are talking about. Second using the Orthodox Study Bible Matt 27:3 says Judas was “ remorseful” and in the footnotes states “ he does not repent” and “ Suicide is not a sign of repentance but of being self-absorbed.” The KJV says Judas, “ repented himself” both say he returned the pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders and said, have sinned by betraying innocent blood. I would like to read Fr Bulgakov’s book because as you quoted him as saying the problem of Judas has never been silent and wells up again. For me that is definitely true because I can identify so easily with him as I know in my heart I have betrayed Christ and it was my sins that nailed Him to the tree. It may sound like Protestant talk but I feel it to be true that even if it was for me alone Christ would have still made His sacrifice. Of course, Christ loved Judas and I think when He said, “ … woe unto THAT MAN by whom the Son of Man is betrayed it had been better for that man if he had not been born.” I capitalized that man because we all betray the Son of Man maybe not in the same way or according to the plan of history but we still do and make our life a living hell. It is for us that are living with the consequences of our sins and enduring the physical and psychic pain we have brought upon ourselves thru them that Christ says with love and compassion it is better for us if we had not been born. But we have been! And the very fact of our existence the truth that God called us from non- existence into being shows that Christ identifies with our human state and freely sacrifices himself for us. Question - reading Matthew it seems that Judas actually partook of the Eucharist, it appears that Christ instituted the Eucharist and gave it to all 12 before Judas left? My point being Christ died for all of us Hitler, Putin, Trump, Xi and me hey that rhymes! I will never get to your level though love your phrases! And love talking about the Divine Providence of God! For me anyway, Orthodoxy theology is like having your big brother cuddle you after you’ve been punished by your Dad and tell you he’s not mad at you. He loves you. Next time you’ll know better next time you’ll admit your mistake. It is hard for me to understand the Russian soul and how intertwined their government is with Orthodoxy because being an American the separation of church and state is so entrenched yet we call ourself a Christian nation. We are not - we are a secular society that more often than not has used Christianity as an excuse or a shield to cover evil deeds from the beginning here in North America to all the wars we have profited from around the world. Do our many, many denominations decry our involvement? Perhaps some do that is true and certainly there are Orthodox Priests in Russia who do also. But I think you did make a distinction between the Institutional Church and the Body of Christ and I think it is important to remember that. They are separate and yet one just as Judas was one betrayer and yet is also all of us. I think that we individually and we as a Church body need to crucify our flesh daily moment by moment examine our hearts and minds and how we are living. They were first called Christians in Antioch, Acts 11:25-29. Can anyone today speak like Agabus? Is there not a famine in the world, literally and spiritually? I believe that when the church “ sends relief” both materially and spiritually and each of us do also “ according to our abilities” then we will by the Grace of God be worthy to be called Christians! Lord have mercy. Let it be so! Today, the harrowing of hell in Scripture, is also the freeing of the captives, those bound in chains. Hades has been filled with the presence of God, is filled and will be filled. The glorious light has shone in the darkness! Let Kitezh rise again!
This is a very thought provoking article, and a great read.
In regard to your statement that Christ's words should be interpreted as, “my beloved, it were better you had not been born into this wicked world whose Archon has twisted your love, but I will save you through death as I trample down death by death", I would revise them just a bit to read, “my beloved, it would have been better if you had merely been stillborn rather than to have been born into this wicked world whose Archon has twisted your love, but I will save you through death as I trample down death by death.”
In much of Christendom, Christ's words are understood to mean Judas must be damned for all eternity, and that universalism is therefore a heresy, as if universalism is true and Judas will one day ultimately be saved by the Christ who died to truly defeat death, hell and the devil for every creature, no matter what evil he did or experienced, it would certainly not have been better for him to have never been born, since he will ultimately experience never-ending bliss.
However, if the proper interpretation is, “my beloved, it would have been better if you had merely been stillborn rather than to have been born into this wicked world whose Archon has twisted your love, but I will save you through death as I trample down death by death", universalism can still be defended and held to, as a stillborn babe will also experience never-ending bliss, yet without ever doing wilfully evil, let alone selling their own loving Creator for 30 pieces of silver, as Judas did.
May God have mercy on ALL, and may we ALL always remember that God loves even those we consider "evil", far more than we could ever even love ourselves.
Dear Noah, I'm a french journalist writing about faith and spirituality. I'm writing now an article about conversions to orthodoxy for L ADN magazine. After reading your oieces about “orthobros”, I would like to interview you. Can I contact you by mail or you at marcbonomelli@gmail.com ? Your help would be very insightful!
It's important that we Christians frequently remind ourselves that God alone should be the object of our worship. Although few Christians will be tempted to worship statues, unfortunately, we have a bad habit of turning to various idols: for the Roman Catholic Church, this is often the Pope (and the Magisterium more broadly); for Protestants, the Bible itself easily becomes a small and portable deity; for the Orthodox, it seems to me, it is Tradition itself that often becomes an idol: a reification of nostalgia for a time that we modern humans never even experienced. (And of course we can easily mix and match these idols, and indeed, quite easily worship all three.)
Of course, neither of these three are somehow bad in themselves—the latter two are necessary pillars of Christian faith!—but if they come to replace God as the objects our worship (which I think they often do, though of course those who have stumbled in this way will deny it) then we are in deep trouble.
Indeed, I came across this error recently in a piece arguing against women's ordination: the argument really boiled down to little more than pointing out that the Church Fathers did not authorize women's ordination, and therefore it must be wrong. As if the Church Fathers are somehow without sin and never made any errors! (Surely, the Fathers worth listening to will have been precisely those quickest to confess their sinfulness.)
And this despite the undeniable fact that, *at minimum*, both Mary Magdalene and Junia were apostles (the latter having been identified as such explicitly by Paul; the former's status as the Apostle to the Apostle did not need to wait for episcopal approval in future centuries: anyone who reads John 20 with any integrity already knows it). Both the presbyterate and episcopate are nothint but the receiving of apostolic responsibility. If women were indeed apostles, how could they not serve as presbyters and bishops—people of much less importance than the apostles themselves? And this is to say nothing of the examples of both Deborah and Huldah from the Hebrew Bible, who clearly show that women's authority was, on occasion, even recognized in ancient times.
Now, I don't say any of this to argue that no one has ever raised any reasonable arguments against women's ordination—I won't pretend to have read everything of note on the subject, and perhaps there is some amazingly persuasive argument out there that I have not come across—but simply to drive home the simple point that we Christians often prefer to pretend Christianity supports our own selfishness rather than hear the radical call of Christ to a truly renewed life.
I guess the way I think of it, is more framed as, the church is anemic and sick, but this does not destroy the efficacy of the mysteries or the fact that just because many don’t get it, there is in the institutional church the power to still help in deification with the saints like st sophrony and paisios. I’m very weary to dismiss the institutional church but rather focus on the people who see themselves who are in it to whom Christ will say in the end I did not know you. The problem I think is automatically considering one who joins the church or even speaks of it as actually part of the church. Baptism offers us the power to enter into and be transformed to enter into the body of Christ but it is only giving us a capacity that must be actualized through the cultivation of virtue, purification, and illumination.
I mention this because a) there are many slowly changing in the church though they might yet meet our standards of enlightenment and more importantly the mysteries of the church are not lost in their efficacy just because of the failures of its leaders.
This is why I disagree in part with David Bentley hart’s criticism of institutional Christianity. Not because of the validity of many of his charges but because even when anemic and sick the institution of the church still preserves the capacity to open to people the kingdom of God. Hart essentially argues after the New Testament or Constantine everything was lost but if this is the case than are we supposed to let go of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximos?
My point is the people in any religion that gets big enough eventually will no longer represent that religion faithfully. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
I did not claim or imply anything about the sacraments being inefficacious, nor did I deny that the sacraments provide deification and are available through the institutional Church (Orthodox, Catholic, Miaphysite, etc.). Likewise, I did not claim that Church history after Constantine is to be thrown out (I am Orthodox), only that many parts of it must be excised from our beliefs in what it means for the Church to be the Church, because tradition is only ever truth (rather than mere habit, custom, or mindless accretion) when it is self-critical creativity informed by the eschaton. My own views here are modelled on DBH's (which are themselves part of Orthodox-Catholic dialogues not foreign to them) who, if you read his book on tradition, in no way says everything post-Constantine is to be thrown out. You continue to flagrantly mischaracterize him.
The above said, your conflation of my views with outright denial of sacramental efficacy manifests your own conflation of institutional structures with the deifying reality of the sacraments. They aren't the same thing, even if the structure is formed around the eucharist as its context, or put another way, the institution only participates in sacramental reality by the sacraments it performs. The institution does not generate them, God sends them and we receive. If one prefers talk of the "Church as pan-sacrament" then still the Church in this sense is NOT the institution, its Christ's eschatological body being manifest as anything sacred.
The confusion of institution with sacrament or as the super-sacred generator of the sacraments is where you then get the sacralization of the institute as coercive power and the doctrines of infallibility and unquestionable authority, which are simple ideological and institutional myth. More than that, this confusion neuters the ability of people like you to follow the example of the prophets and condemn the institution when it needs condemning. Not only does the Moscow Patriarchate as an institution need to be condemned today, not just Kyrill or individual priests and bishops, much of the whole Church structure and ideological self-understanding of Orthodoxy needs to be condemned or we will continue to call evil good. This isn't exaggeration, as I am sure you are well aware of the wicked nationalistic/fascistic/imperialistic histories and self-understandings held by many of the Orthodox jurisdictions, as well as the reality that Orthodox jurisdictions and bishops all relate to each other exactly like the rulers of the Gentiles of which Christ said "it shall not be so among you," and I could name many more things though we might disagree.
Lastly, do you even disagree with the understanding of living tradition as self-critical, even self-repudiating, creativity informed by the eschaton? Whenever I say or write something on this topic, or when DBH has, people always clutch their pearls, mischaracterize, and then give some toe the line "blame individuals not holy mother Church" answer, but all this looks like is coating a basically fundamentalist view of tradition and Church history in petty platitudes.
I'm sorry if it came across that I was saying that you personally did not believe in the mysteries, etc... I should have framed it much better. My point was not to antagonize or to misrepresent. My only point I think is not meant to be negative but constructive. Sorry if it came off so strongly before. The point I was trying to make, is that though the institutional church must be critiqued and we must identify when it goes astray, when we continue a certain form of rhetoric, it starts to appear as if the institutional church is the bad guy or irredeemable. All I meant to suggest was focusing the critique on the people who stray from the church and essentially though representing the church, say like even Metropolitan Krill, then we can see the Church and the institution as separate--as in my mind it should be--from those who would ruin it's image by not truly being Christian and twice the sons of the devil. I guess you don't like this, but I don't think either that the whole institution is fucked and terrible. Much of it is, but what changes would you make. Are we going to have democratic elections and let the mob rule? I think that the problem is as soon as you take an abstract category or idea (institution) and characterize it so negatively, it becomes hard for people to understand then what you do appreciate about the Church.
Also as a note, I did understand what Hart was getting at and in broad strokes his book has a truth at bottom that the event or apocalypse of Christ is never done inspiring us, it is an event that produces an infinite horizon of interpretation which can't allow for ossification. I am, I think, more sympathetic than you think. It's just for me at least, the echoing of Hart here, brought to mind the criticism I had of his book which I think is founded. He paints it black and white. Constantine wasn't a vicious mongrel nor was he probably a saint, but when he did become emperor there was in fact a number of changes he made which were rather beneficial too. The same can be said of so many more figures of church history. Obviously their are flaws which many seem to gloss over or excuse, but to go the route of totalizing the institution as completely flawed goes to far I think.
I didn't mean to spark an argument. I was just responding and hoping to understand more about what you mean, because, it seems you do agree with me, in some ways more than you think.
My apologies for responding as if you were being combative and misrepresenting me.
The institutional Church often is the bad guy, and whether it can be redeemed depends entirely on our ability to honestly condemn it and aspects of it so that they can be purged, instead of assuming institutional holiness and blaming individuals. This is on the surface equivalent to the problem of politics of whether one should condemn institutions/systems of power and call for radical change/re-evaluation or blame individual politicians while upholding the system as essentially good when "done right" or when the right person is in power. The difference is that the Church, if it is the eschatological reality of holiness and truth we believe it is, cannot be identified with any earthly system and must always critique/subvert/transcend such systems. The confusion of the eschaton with the institution is precisely the reduction of Church to earthly institution and of tradition to inertia (which may preserve custom but, as Bulgakov says, only evil grows by inertia).
Really, this confusion results in an attitude towards the Church indistinguishable from nationalist or even fascist political attitudes. It is characterized not only by authoritarianism and exceptionalism, but also the inherent uncomfortability with self-reflection and critique, fear of uncertainty and the other, etc., and so is motivated by all the same psychological complexes as the mentioned political stances. To use the Russian Church as an example, it is not merely Kyrill or any individual who is alone to blame, it is the institution of the Russian Church as such, its history, its organization and self-understanding, and its systems of power as it exists now making it what it is. As an institution it has to be condemned, and to be redeemed it requires vast change, and I hope you would agree with that.
You ask what changes I would make, and I do not know specifically when it comes to institutional structure. Those questions will need to be worked out ecumenically, though ideally I wish Christianity would move towards an understanding of itself as a people rather than competing institutional structures, a people made up of many diverse communities with much more local bishops, dropping the pretense of infallibility and coercive power, and which as a people would be able to have a general common vision of Godmanhood (or apokatastasis or Tikkun) for living in and transforming the world. The complexities of coming closer to this vision will though be subject to the whims of historical contingency as this vision would require ecumenical rapprochement, and so the negotiating of various communions.
As for what I do appreciate about the Church and its history, I appreciate those glimpses of the eschaton which are present in it, the martyrs and saints. I appreciate its philosophical and theological geniuses, and its doctrines (though not the violent enforcement of them nor their narrow interpretation). I also appreciate the many ways Christendom did impact world history and culture for the better, as DBH has also expressed in Tradition and Apocalypse and in various talks and articles (I simply do not think you accurately represent his stances). Do you think I should also appreciate the Church as a coercive power pitting bare authority against rationality and conscience?
I am not meaning to be rude in any of the above, I simply want to be clear as possible why or where we disagree.
Thank you for the thoughtful and articulate response!
Oh my! So much in this article I am going to need to print it out to fully answer but I took some notes so first question- where did you find the picture of the woodcarving ?!! It so perfectly illustrates what you are talking about. Second using the Orthodox Study Bible Matt 27:3 says Judas was “ remorseful” and in the footnotes states “ he does not repent” and “ Suicide is not a sign of repentance but of being self-absorbed.” The KJV says Judas, “ repented himself” both say he returned the pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders and said, have sinned by betraying innocent blood. I would like to read Fr Bulgakov’s book because as you quoted him as saying the problem of Judas has never been silent and wells up again. For me that is definitely true because I can identify so easily with him as I know in my heart I have betrayed Christ and it was my sins that nailed Him to the tree. It may sound like Protestant talk but I feel it to be true that even if it was for me alone Christ would have still made His sacrifice. Of course, Christ loved Judas and I think when He said, “ … woe unto THAT MAN by whom the Son of Man is betrayed it had been better for that man if he had not been born.” I capitalized that man because we all betray the Son of Man maybe not in the same way or according to the plan of history but we still do and make our life a living hell. It is for us that are living with the consequences of our sins and enduring the physical and psychic pain we have brought upon ourselves thru them that Christ says with love and compassion it is better for us if we had not been born. But we have been! And the very fact of our existence the truth that God called us from non- existence into being shows that Christ identifies with our human state and freely sacrifices himself for us. Question - reading Matthew it seems that Judas actually partook of the Eucharist, it appears that Christ instituted the Eucharist and gave it to all 12 before Judas left? My point being Christ died for all of us Hitler, Putin, Trump, Xi and me hey that rhymes! I will never get to your level though love your phrases! And love talking about the Divine Providence of God! For me anyway, Orthodoxy theology is like having your big brother cuddle you after you’ve been punished by your Dad and tell you he’s not mad at you. He loves you. Next time you’ll know better next time you’ll admit your mistake. It is hard for me to understand the Russian soul and how intertwined their government is with Orthodoxy because being an American the separation of church and state is so entrenched yet we call ourself a Christian nation. We are not - we are a secular society that more often than not has used Christianity as an excuse or a shield to cover evil deeds from the beginning here in North America to all the wars we have profited from around the world. Do our many, many denominations decry our involvement? Perhaps some do that is true and certainly there are Orthodox Priests in Russia who do also. But I think you did make a distinction between the Institutional Church and the Body of Christ and I think it is important to remember that. They are separate and yet one just as Judas was one betrayer and yet is also all of us. I think that we individually and we as a Church body need to crucify our flesh daily moment by moment examine our hearts and minds and how we are living. They were first called Christians in Antioch, Acts 11:25-29. Can anyone today speak like Agabus? Is there not a famine in the world, literally and spiritually? I believe that when the church “ sends relief” both materially and spiritually and each of us do also “ according to our abilities” then we will by the Grace of God be worthy to be called Christians! Lord have mercy. Let it be so! Today, the harrowing of hell in Scripture, is also the freeing of the captives, those bound in chains. Hades has been filled with the presence of God, is filled and will be filled. The glorious light has shone in the darkness! Let Kitezh rise again!