Phronema of our Fathers

In this book, the first of its kind in the English language, Ariane Trifunovic Montemuro introduces her beloved friend, Saint Matrona the Blind of Moscow. The author not only shares her love for this Russian Orthodox Christian Saint but also reveals why she is our friend in Christ. The Lord endowed the blind Matrona with gifts of spiritual foresight and healing. In turn, this servant of God promised to never refuse anyone who sincerely asked her for help. Matrona's promise still holds true long after her death. She continues to search for the lost and bring them back to Christ. Those who seek her intercessory prayers before God soon feel her presence in their lives. Even today, believers continually flock to seek intercessions before her relics at Holy Protection Monastery in Moscow, Russia.

We discuss this phenomenal work

The author of this book, Saint Luke the Confessor (his worldly name was Valentin Yasenetsky-Voyno), is a Russian saint of the twentieth century. He was born on April 27, 1877 in Kerch, Crimea and fell asleep in the Lord on June 11, 1961 in Simferopol, Crimea. Canonized by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) in November 1995.

He was a descendent of a Belarusian-Polish impoverished princely family, and he was archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church and at the same time a prominent physician, surgeon, inventor, scientist, writer and painter.

The title of this book is a quote from Saint Luke's letter to his eldest son Mikhail. The full sentence is: "I began to love suffering that so amazingly purifies the soul."

During the severe trials of the Russian Church, when the communists had come to power in the country and were engaged in a methodical genocide of the clergy, Innocenty, Bishop of Tashkent, asked him to become a priest. Valentin Yasenetsky accepted this request and received priestly ordination, with the bishop describing his future mission in the words of the Holy Apostle Paul: "not to baptize, but to evangelize." (1Cor 1:17)

Over the years, after the death of his beloved wife, he took monastic vows and was named after the holy Evangelist Luke; then he was ordained a bishop. After many prosecutions by the Soviet authorities and convictions on false grounds (including false testimonials from some colleagues, students and friends, as well as false reports, elicited by the secret police) and an exile for many years to Siberia, above the Arctic Circle, he was eventually released and he ended his days as Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea. Throughout all the trials, he remained true to his Russian Orthodox faith and principles, and continued his work as a doctor and scientist, despite the blindness that struck him in the last years of his life.

by Fr. A. James Bernstein

The story of a man searching for truth and unable to rest until he finds it. Raised in Queens, New York, by formerly Orthodox Jewish parents whose faith had been undermined by the Holocaust, Arnold Bernstein went on his own personal quest for the God he instinctively felt was there. He was ready to accept God in whatever form He chose to reveal Himself--and that form turned out to be Christ. But Bernstein soon perceived discrepancies in the various forms of Protestant belief that surrounded him, and so his quest continued--this time for the true Church. With his Jewish heritage as a foundation, he studied and evaluated, and eventually came to the conclusion that the faith of his forefathers was fully honored and brought to completion only in the Orthodox Christian Church.

Surprised by Christ combines an engrossing memoir of one man's life in historic times and situations--from the Six-Day War to the Civil Rights Movement to the Jesus Movement in Berkeley--with a deeply felt examination of the distinctives of Orthodox theology that make the Orthodox Church the true home not only for Christian Jews, but for all who seek to know God as fully as He may be known.

About the Author: The Rev. A. James Bernstein was a teenage chess champion whose dramatic conversion experience at the age of 16 led him to Christianity. His spiritual journey has included a number of twists and turn: he was chapter president of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship at Queens College, helped found the Jews for Jesus ministry in San Francisco, was a staff member of the Christian World Liberation Front in Berkeley, served as a pastor of an Evangelical Orthodox Church near Silicon Valley, and later became an Eastern Orthodox convert and then priest. He lives with his wife Bonnie outside of Seattle, Washington, where he serves as pastor of St. Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church. Father James is the author of the booklets Orthodoxy: Jewish and Christian (Conciliar Press, 1990); Which Came First: The Church or the New Testament (CP, 1994); Communion: A Family Affair (CP, 1999); Heaven and Hell (AFP, 2009); The Original Gospel (AFP, 2010), and Discovering the Prophecies of Christ (AFP, 2016). He was also a contributor to the Orthodox Study Bible: New Testament and Psalms (Thomas Nelson, 1993).

Professor Patsavos' approach reflects the very essence and nature of the Canonical Tradition of the Orthodox Church; namely, that the canons are of a spiritual and pastoral dimension, striving for the salvation of the souls of God's people. This insightful book is accompanied by an index that classifies the Holy Canons for easy reference.

"Behold, I make all things new!" --Rev. 21:5

At the center of Christian faith and at the very heart of Orthodox spirituality, the proclamation of the Resurrection, whose promise is realized with the sending of the Spirit, is the living source of the Church's confession of faith. In this book, His Beatitude, Patriarch Ignatius IV offers a meditation on salvation offered to man by the resurrected Christ and the Holy Spirit, in whom all things are created anew.

In the words of the author, the surprising affirmation, "Behold, I make all things new," is "not to be relegated into the future beyond history; it reveals the new world which, starting from the present, enters into the sphere of our own temporal order. The dramatic tension in which we are living, therefore, is not situated between a conceptual transcendence and a phenomenal immanence; it is located between two levels of time: this present age which is both dialogical and diabolical; and the new time which is 'parousial' and which renders this present age 'paschal.'"

Baptism, says Patriarch Ignatius, is the sacrament which renews us and brings us into the new Creation, precisely because it brings us into the communion of the Church. This awareness, he says, "should lead us, in our inter-Church relations, to re-center everything on the Church as the great sacrament, and to search all the more vigorously for ways to overcome the divisions which still exists in our communion of faith. It is up to us whether the New Creation remains hidden and meaningless, or whether it deifies man and transfigures the world. Such is our responsibility in the quest for authentic renewal."

About the Author: Ignatius IV, Patriarch of Antioch, of blessed memory, was one of the Presidents of the World Council of Churches. A graduate of St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, he served for many years as Dean of the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Balamand, Lebanon. As one of the founders of the very active Orthodox Youth Movement (MJO) of Lebanon and Syria, he helped organize and lead the renewal of church and monastic life in the patriarchate of Antioch.

nternationally esteemed as one of the most outstanding Greek Orthodox theologians and patristic scholars of our time, Fr. John Romanides was also a groundbreaking pioneer. Paradoxically, he did not break new but neglected and hallowed ancient ground. In an age of religious syncretism and rationalism, this classic work brings to light ancient truths long ago replaced by juridical schemes and forgotten in most Christian denomination.
Truths regarding the creation 'ex nihilo', the destiny of man, Adam's sin and fall, the origin of death, soteriology and God's relations with the world were exposited as the doctrines of the primitive Church by the Apostolic and post-Apostolic Fathers of the first and second centuries. Hindered by the paradigms of post-Augustinian thought, Western Christianity has rarely understood these doctrines that predate by several centuries the commonly held juridical ideas of original sin and atonement.
This book is the only in-depth comparative study of these doctrines and the underlying paradigms of the earliest Church Fathers on the one hand and the scholastic theologians on the other. IT demonstrates the integrity of the faith and apophatic theology of early Church in sharp contrast to the Augustinian and scholastic rationalism expressed by the aphorism credo intellegam, or 'I believe in order to comprehend.'
Dr. Romanides devoted his life to the authentic Tradition of the Church Fathers, differentiating it from the post-Augustinian thought worlds that had obscured it even in the Orthodox East.

Archimadrite Justin was born in Vranje on the Feast of the Annunciation, 1894, of parents Spiridon and Anastasija. He stud-ied at the Seminary of Saint Sava in Belgrade from 1905 to 1914. During the First World War, he retreated to Skadar with the Serbian army, where, with the blessing of Metropolitan Dimitrije, he received monastic profession in 1916, tak-ing the name of Saint Justin the martyr and philosopher. His secular name had been Blagoje. Metropolitan Dimitrije sent him for further study to Petrograd and Oxford. He returned to Belgrade after the war, and was appointed as an assistant at the seminary in Sremski Karlovci. He received his doctorate of Athens University in 1926, with the doctoral thesis: 'The Problem of the Person and of Knowledge according to Saint Makarios of Egypt'. On his return to Sremski Karlovci, he edited the periodical 'Christian Life'. Transferred to the Prizren seminary, and then sent back to Karlovci in 1931, he worked alongside Metropolitan Josif Cvijović in the Carpathian area of Czechoslovakia, organising church life among the Carpatho-Russians. On his return, he was transferred to the Bitolj sem-inary, and was chosen in 1934 to be professor of Dogmatics and Comparative Theology at the Theological Faculty in Belgrade. He remained in this position until the end of the war, at which time the communist authoritities removed him from his work in the university. After this, he lived in various monasteries in Serbia, and in 1948 went to the monastery of Ćelije near Valjevo, where he remained until his death as the monastery's spiritual father. He devoted himself completely to prayer and to theological and scientific work and translation, to which his very many published and unpublished works bear witness. He entered into rest in the Lord on the Feast of the Annunciation, 1979.

The Seer describes the life and work of the Prophet Samuel, called ‘the Seer’ by his contemporaries. Early chapters focus on Hannah’s prayer and discuss prayer of the heart. There are practical comments about family relationships and bringing up children in the Church. The chapter on Samuel’s sons considers why children from devout families sometimes rebel. The Prophet Samuel received revelations from God and possessed the spiritual gifts of clear sight and seeing into the future. There is a detailed discussion of what exactly these charismas are and why God bestows them. There is a compelling account of how Saul was filled with the Holy Spirit when anointed by Samuel, and how he later lost this gift. Saul’s sins seem superficially trivial, but were actually so grave that they caused God to ‘change His mind’ about him. As a spiritual father, the author is able to understand and describe Samuel’s profound grief over Saul’s fall. This is an interesting, enlightening and very readable book for the general reader about a major biblical and historical figure. For spiritual fathers and those they guide it throws light on the mystery of obedience and the consequences of disobedience. For parents and would-be parents it has a personal message. And for all Christians it provides an inspiring example of a man of God filled with spiritual gifts, who was in communion with God throughout his life and never grieved Him at any point.

The Eastern Church Fathers stressed that the Bible is not of its own kind but was born and shaped in a community of faith. They understood Scripture to be an essential element of Holy Tradition: the apostolic witness passed down and developed into the fundamental teachings of Orthodox Christianity.

This book offers a fresh look at the way Eastern patristic writers used Scripture in elaborating what would become the body of Orthodox doctrine. It begins with a discussion of the aims and methods of biblical interpretation as they were developed among the Greek Fathers. The second section introduces the reader to the ancient literary form known as chiasmus and shows how important a proper "chiastic" reading of the biblical text can be for revealing its "literal" meaning.

The final section takes up several crucial issues concerning the Orthodox doctrines of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Raising from a new perspective the divisive question of the filioque, it demonstrates the continuing importance of the Nicene Creed for expressing the most basic and significant teachings of Orthodoxy: God as Trinity and God incarnate. These doctrines reflect as clearly as any others the way Scripture takes shape in Tradition, while it serves as the ground and measure of Tradition.

About the Author:  The Very Rev John Breck was Professor of New Testament and Ethics at St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary from 1984 to 1996. He is presently Professor of Biblical Interpretation and Ethics at St Sergius Theological Institute, Paris, France, and with his wife, Lyn, directs the St Silouan Retreat Center near Charleston, SC.