Entries in Life

More from Fr Alexander’s I Believe:

More than once in my life I have had to stand at the bedside of a dying child in terrible suffering. And what? Could I explain anything at all to those who stood around the bed? Could I vindicate or justify these sufferings and this death “religiously”, as they say? No, I was only able to say: God is here, God is. I could only confess how impossible it is to measure that presence with our sorrow-filled, earthly questions.

How starkly this contrasts with the work of apologists who can explain anything and don’t hesitate to tell us why there is suffering and death. At one point, I think I may have understood why people suffer and why there is death. I don’t think I do any more. Sure, I know the textbook answers, but they seem inadequate. I know that many people find them unsatisfactory. I do know that I AM. I have faith because I AM — God is so real that I cannot escape the reality of his presense. Fr Alex goes on:

No, of course faith is not the product of my need for explanations. But then where does it come from? Does it come from fear of suffering after death? Or does it come from being frightened of total annihilation, from that passionate and ultimately egotistical inner desire not to be annihilated? No, this is not why I believe, for it seems to me that speculations about life after death and immortality—even the most intellligent philosophical speculations—are just so much childish babbling. What do I know about all this? And what can I tell others?

(Emphasis mine.) Here we clearly see apophatic theology at work. Admitting that talk about the things like the afterlife; the “rapture”; “post-”, “pre-”, or “mid-trib”; etc. sounds like “so much childish babbling” is a start in the right direction of contextualizing theology.

True, there are those who try to prove to us that religion is a comforting escape, a refusal to struggle, man’s self-betrayal, dead and immovable dogmatism leading us away from hard questions and searching. However, those who make such claims invariably supress words which describe the very heart of religious experience and religious faith: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst…”; “Seek and you will find…”; “I came not to bring peace, but a sword…”. It is significant that those who hate religion always base their attack on this crude and elementary deception, for without this lie their assault on religion would be impossible to sustain for even a single day.

— Fr Alexander Schmemann, I Believe

This seems so true today. “Those who hate religion”, though, would be right to say that some purveyors of faith offer a simplistic view of faith with “immovable dogmatism leading us away from hard questions and searching”. I suspect this dogmatism is what is creating the latest Anabaptist Movement in the form of the Emerging Church.

I’m obsessed with sleep. Hrm… maybe that’s not it. I’m frustrated by sleep. I don’t want to do it most of the time. But I gotta. Anyway, it looks like I’m not the only one who thinks to much about sleep. A post on waking up feeling refreshed has gotten 100 comments (and counting) in the past two weeks.

After writing about C.S. Lewis, rats and sin, I got a couple of interesting responses. The first was an email from my mother:

I’m not sure what is the big difference in the sin issue, we all have sinned, we all continue to sin, we all are tempted to sin. (All of sinned and come short of God’s glory.” “There is none that doeth good…”) Yes, we can confess, and address the temptations to sin … but the tendency to sin is perpetual. If we get to the point of thinking we have it all made, then we begin to deal with false pride (sin). And the more subtle sins such as an ungrateful heart (hey! I have this sin thing licked)

There is a subtle, but vital, difference here. The temptation to sin is always with us. We can how we tend to respond. The Orthodox affirm Roman’s statement that “All have sinned” but they see it as more of a descriptive statement (“Look, everyone has sinned”) rather than a perscriptive one (“Man is so corrupt that it is completely impossible for him to avoid sin”). The Orthodox do not teach that you are born guilty of sin. Yes, “I was conceived in a sinful world” but, no, I did not bear the guilt of sin from my conception. This is even reflected in the Orthodox understanding of the Cross. Esther Lily’s baptism included the statement that Christ died to free her from Satan’s Tyranny. At Pascha, we sing “Christ has risen from the dead and trampled Death by death.” Salvation, in the Orthodox understanding, is the process of removing sin’s control over us. Of course, if we began to think that we were no longer threatened by temptation, we would be in danger again. This is why the Orthodox teach the need for a spiritual father: he helps us see the sin we can’t see. Is this a foolproof method? Of course not! Many Orthodox people don’t understand it and I’m a poor example of it. But understanding that we do not have an inherent tendency to sin is a helpful change in paradigm. The other response was from . Jim wrote:

The conundrum for me is this…we have to find a way to affirm the notion that God’s creation is good and that we have been endowed with an inherent goodness but at the same time we have to affirm the reality that the world groans for redemption and that humanity lives no where close to God’s created intention for it. The Reformed Tradition places an incredible amount of stress on the fallen nature of the world, the total depravity of humankind, and the absolute need for God to regenerate the degenerate. It focuses so much on that end of things that it seems to exclude any ability to see much inherent good in either the created world or in humankind. That is probably not the best approach. On the other hand, I seem to hear a lot of Christians affirming the goodness of humanity and the world to the point that they deny the reality of sin or evil. […] My question essentially boils down to this…where did it all go wrong and how does the Orthodox Tradition hold these two in balance???

As far as I know, it all began to go wrong with Augustine. The Orthodox still respect him and consider him a Saint, but reject his idea of Original Sin and such. Now, if you never held idea that we are, at our core, wholly sinful, the opposite problem doesn’t come into play. That is, if you haven’t been told you’re inherently worthless, then there is no need to play Pollyanna and ignore reality. So, of course God’s creation is good. Of course, we have the capability to do good: all common sense and our own experience tells us this. Why, sometimes I’ve managed to do the right thing without any sin whatsoever! So I know that I have the capablity. The problem is that we live in a fallen world. This is a world where temptation isn’t always obvious. The right choice isn’t always obvious, especially since most of us have not achieved theosis, or unity with God. However, unity with God is possible. With the Holy Spirit working in us to draw out the image of God with which each of us were created, we can live righteous lives. Make no mistake: the standard is set high. But that standard is heavily tempered with Love because that is who God is. We all know that we can live better, no one doubts that he is a long distance from perfection. But perfection is attainable and in this life. Evil things really happen. It is a perverse generation, but we can seek God and his righteousness. Death and sin are conquered! That is the good news of the cross. Their effects aren’t simply mitigated. We don’t just get a pass even though we continue to sin. No, sin is conquered and Death is destroyed. Satan, the illegitimate usurper, has been overthrown! So why does sin continue? Since we can no longer blame Satan (“the Devil made me do it”) and we are not completely degenerate at our core of our soul (which is in the image of God), we are completly to blame for own own sin. We choose, however unconciously at times, to sin. Orthodox spirituality provides a way to experience God and, through that experience, learn how to deal with the temptation to sin. In this way we acknowlege that we sin but also that sin is overcome by grace. Does this answer your question? Do any Orthodox want to comment on how wrong I am?

Even if they’re able to accomplish their goals, the EC will still be missing something. They’ll be missing a monastic tradition. They‘ll be missing the mystical tradition. Now, I know about groups like the Bruderhof, but even they do not fill the role of monasticism. A family living in community cannot dedicate itself solely to God. They must still care for each other. Further, most protestants I know (and even some Catholics and Orthodox) reject the idea of monasticism entirely. But why is the monasticism important to Christianity? Well, look at how monasteries started. When Christians were no longer persecuted in the 3rd century, martyrdom relatively disappeared. The monastics became the new spiritual heros for Christianity. Monastics help us to understand how to experience God. The provide a living example of theosis. It is very difficult for any person with worldly attachements, be they family, job, or property, to attain theosis. Thus, we need the monastics to draw us closer to the experience of God. Theosis or anything like it is almost compeletly absent from most of protestant Christian practice. We can understand the paucity of this experience when we see that the Protestant Reformation was the result of the embrace of objective truth. Empiricism and philosophy have so overwhelmed the protestant understanding of God that they’ve neglected the experience of God. Christ himself taught that we see God through our heart. We experience him and know him through the heart — thought and analysis of scripture doesn’t bring us closer to him. So, what does the EC offer? It offers to “reconstruct” Christianity in a way that is still focused on a result: getting (post-)modern people into Church. I have always struggled with this focus on the results of any effort. The EC feels, to me, as if it were yet-another attempt to market the message to an “unchurched” world. Yes, it is a good thing to separate Christianity from the Republicans. But, are you doing it just to reach people who wouldn’t otherwise listen? Sure, it’s good to have a more “narrative” approach to Scripture. But is that just the result of post-modern influence on Christians? Or is this the easiest way to reconcile scientific materialism with your faith?

Wow! This has been quite a weekend. It started Saturday morning with a Tiger Scout hike. Not too long, but afterwards dvfmama had some fun activities planned for everyone. Then we came home and did some hoeing in our small patch of garden. Today we went to church and got to eat some great Greek food — this weekend is the annual bazaar. Then we did some shopping at Home Depot, came home and hoed some more. We finished up planting our tulips, rye grass, and, new this year, some rose of sharon bushes. Alexis will transplant those in the spring. Workwise, I’ve fallen behind on some obligations and I still have to plan something for the Tiger scout meeting tomorrow. Oh, and the person working on the church website has had to leave so I’ll be taking that over (along with another busy family man). The work in the garden was great for body, soul, and mind, but now I feel behind. Eh, I’ll live. Yet, instead of doing anything else that was pressing, I took part of the evening and read the first bit of Mountain of Silence. It’s raining now. We did our planting just in time.

Jim Bonewald has gone and written up his thoughts about the Emerging Church (“EC” hereafter) after I asked him for them. Thanks, Jim! I appreciate his perspective. I’ve been poking around the edges of the EC and I like some of what I hear, but other bits… I’m not comfortable with. So hearing Jim’s thoughts helps me to see what is attractive about the EC to protestants. continue reading »