No Other Foundation

As a baby boomer child of the 1950s, I was taught to hate war. For my generation, war was an unmitigated evil (though, happily, this notion did not spill over into hating or disrespecting our soldiers—later described as “peace-keepers”). Our generation’s hatred of war was well expressed in the 1969 heart-felt anti-war song popularized by Edwin Starr, some of the lyrics of which were, “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!...War I despise, ‘cause it means destruction of innocent lives…It ain’t nothing but a heart-breaker, friend only to the under-taker!”

When I was young, I read a famous poem that I now regard as one of the strangest poems ever written. It is the one entitled “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas with its repeated refrain “do not go gentle into that good night…rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

When I was a child in grade five, I was given a New Testament by the Gideon Society, like everyone else in my grade. Note: the New Testament, not the entire Bible. I suspect that the decision to confine the gift to the New Testament Scriptures was dictated more by economics than by theology—after all, there were a lot of kids in the schools in those days and giving an entire Bible to each one of them would have cost a lot. Nonetheless the decision tended to give the impression that it was only the New Testament that mattered and that the Old Testament didn’t count for much for Christians.

I am often asked by catechumens questions of basic liturgical etiquette, such as how to enter the church, how to venerate an icon, and when to make the sign of the cross. I am always happy to explain and (if in church) to demonstrate, since these are things that Orthodox people should know and do instinctively. They are part of forming an Orthodox mind and approach to life and worship. But there is a danger in answering such questions without first placing them in a wider context, because answering them without context might give the erroneous impression that Orthodoxy is all about rules.

There are, I suggest, two ways to experience the world. The first is that of the materialist: the world is all that exists. The physical world that we see and experience has no real or intrinsic meaning; it just is. We can, if we like, endow it with meaning from our own heads, but such meaning would be entirely subjective. Religion or philosophy, they say, might imagine that meaning can be discerned in world, but this is an illusion.

I recently read in Jaroslav Pelikan’s excellent Jesus Through the Centuries a line from American scholar Arthur O. Lovejoy, who asserted, “The term ‘Christianity’ is not the name for any single unit of the type for which the historian of specific ideas looks.” Rather, the term describes “a series of facts which, taken as a whole, have almost nothing in common except the name”. At first I thought his statement was absurd, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was true. And that I did not believe in Christianity. Please let me explain.

If you Google the term “Pharisees” you find the following: “The Pharisees were a Jewish social movement and school of thought in the Levant during the time of Second Temple Judaism”. That definition is historically true, but spirituality inadequate, for Pharisees were and are not confined to the Levant or to the time of Second Temple Judaism. They can be found almost anywhere, in all places and in all religions. Modern Orthodoxy is home to many of them, for Pharisaism remains a perennial spiritual temptation afflicting the heart of man and especially of the pious.

It occurred to me recently that it is significant that the invisible enemy of our souls is called “the Evil One” in both the Lord’s Prayer and in such passages as 1 John 5:19. That is, our adversary is never named, but only referred to obliquely. He is also referred to as “the Adversary” from the Hebrew word for adversary “satan” (see e.g. the curse in Psalm 109:6 which reads “Appoint a wicked man over him and let a satan stand at his right hand”). This Hebrew word was transliterated into the Greek as Σατάν/ Satan and used as a title in such passages as 1 Thessalonians 2:18. He is also referred to as “the Slanderer” (Greek δίαβολος/ diabololos), usually rendered in English as “the Devil”. Note: all these words are titles, not names; they are in fact verbal circumlocutions used to avoid mentioning his actual name.

From the days of Moses when God made a covenant through him with Israel to come and dwell in their midst, Israel has offered sacrifice to Yahweh their God. The detailed instructions for offering sacrifices and for the shrine centre built to receive them are found in the Pentateuch. Originally this shrine was portable, meant to be disassembled and reassembled throughout Israel’s journeying. It was reassembled in Shiloh which then served as the liturgical and spiritual focal point of Israel’s worship and the center of national unity. David moved the Ark into his new capital of Jerusalem, and his son Solomon built a (very immovable and permanent) Temple to house the Ark. Thereafter all the sacrifices to Yahweh (all the legitimately-sanctioned ones anyway) were offered in that Temple in Jerusalem.

In many Orthodox churches, baptisms are done privately and almost secretly: after the morning Divine Liturgy at which the entire church community was present had concluded and all the people had left, a few people remained behind—or perhaps, if they had not been at the Liturgy, came to church deliberately late to attend the private family baptism to which they had been invited. If Liturgy began at 9.30 am and concluded at 11.00 am and if the people had all dispersed after the post-Liturgy coffee hour, then a baptism would be held in the now empty church around 1.00 or 2.00 pm.