No Other Foundation

People sometimes ask me “What is the strangest question you were ever asked in all your years of Orthodox ministry?” I can recall many strange questions (such as “Did Adam have a belly-button?”) but perhaps few were stranger than the question which queried, “Are we allowed to lift up our hands in church when we pray?” My guess is that the query came from discomfort with some modern charismatic practices which include raising one’s hands in church whenever praying or singing. It is clearly a case of “guilt by association”: those crazy charismatics seem to always raise their hands in prayer, so we shouldn’t.

I would like to invite you to come with me on a journey of imagination that may help us to understand what it was like to live in “Bible times”. To make this journey you will need to leave behind absolutely everything you know about geography and science.

I have just finished watching a three-part documentary entitled “A band called LoveSong”, produced by the group itself and focusing upon their music and their part in the Jesus People movement in the 1970s. Pathologically nostalgic old man that I am, I enjoyed the trip down memory lane. The men in the band are now of course much older but they are still singing the old songs.

For some people, the significance of the saints is that of mediators, those who stand between us and God and through their prayers reconcile us to Him and sanctify us. In this way of thinking, Christians are primarily sinners who need to be saved and sanctified, who need a connection with the holy so that they can go from being guilty and profane to being forgiven and holy. The saints, in this setting, provide just this connection. (We note in passing that this mindset tends to forget such texts as 1 Timothy 2:5 and to confuse a mediator with an intercessor. Any Christian, including a saint, can intercede for someone else; Christ alone reconciles us to God.)

During the tumultuous fourth century when it seemed everyone in the Church was fighting everyone else and Arians and Orthodox (to use modern terms) were going at it hammer and tong, one of the weapons used in those debates was the Bible. All the arguing parties called themselves “orthodox” and “catholics”; all of them said they believed in the Holy Trinity (i.e. all could read Matthew 28:19) and all said they believed in “Christ our God” (since the term had been around since St. Ignatius of Antioch used it in his letters at the beginning of the second century). The question was: what did it mean to describe Christ as “God”? Was He truly divine or just sort of divine by participation? What precisely was the nature of His divinity? All the parties doing the arguing said that the Bible supported their views and not the views of their adversaries.

Odds are that if you began to talk about “kenosis” in a room full of strangers they would assume you were talking about a change in your metabolism. Nope: that’s “ketosis”, not “kenosis”. The term “kenosis” is a theological term used to describe the divine self-emptying that occurred at the Incarnation of the eternal Logos/ Word in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

One question that is often asked of pastors by new converts is “How often should I go to confession?” Closely allied to this query is the one which asks, “Do I need to go to confession each time before receiving Holy Communion?” These are good questions, and because they deal with the human heart, the answers are not simple. It is not like answering a query about the posted speed limit by saying, “It’s forty miles per hour and if you exceed the limit you’re breaking the law and will get a speeding ticket”. Despite the approach and views of the Pharisees with their love of laws and legalism, the matter of salvation and the healing of the heart defies such simple answers. All real pastors know this.

Twenty-five years ago today, on September 11, 2001, many innocent people died in New York City— almost 3000 by one count. Those were the ones trapped in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center when two airplanes, commandeered by Islamic terrorists, flew into those buildings in order to make a statement and kill as many Americans as possible. Such was the horror and trauma of that day that its date, abbreviated as the number “911”, has ever since become a symbol of terrorist atrocity and heroic American determination to survive and prevail. The trauma and outrage of that day were felt around the world. Like the event in Dallas of November 22, 1963, many people remember exactly where they were when they first heard the news of 911.

I have just finished re-reading the late J. N. D. Kelly’s wonderfully readable biography of Jerome and it made me a bit sad. St. Jerome was, of course, the greatest Christian scholar of his day and he deserves immense credit for soldiering ahead with his translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew when he knew that he would get all kinds of grief for it. But for all his scholarship and brilliance he was hard to like—at least as he survives in history books. He was famously abusive in his literary opposition to those he considered his foes and quick to take offense, which combines to make a pretty toxic cocktail. But what made me the most sad was his ferocious opposition to sex.

In chapter 14 of the Didache, a work dating to about 100 A.D., we read the following: “On the Lord’s own day gather together and break bread and give thanks, having first confessed your sins so that your sacrifice [i.e. the Eucharist] may be pure. But let no one who has a quarrel with a companion join you until they have been reconciled so that your sacrifice may not be defiled. For this is the sacrifice concerning which the Lord said, ‘In every place and time offer me a pure sacrifice, for I am a great king, says the Lord, and my name is marvelous among the nations.’” (The citation is from Malachi 1:11.)