Reflections on Orthodox Theology and Biblical Studies
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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…
Readers of this blog may not be familiar with the Homoeans which would be quite understandable for they all died out centuries ago. Now they can only be discovered within the pages of church history books, but they were all the rage in the fourth century. Let’s review.
There have been a number of times throughout my ministry that I have been asked by inquirers or parishioners if I would be their spiritual father. My answer is always the same: “No, but I am happy to be your pastor and your friend”. Sometimes I explain more fully: “People in parishes don’t need a spiritual father; they need a pastor.” My guess is that my attitude is a common one among parish…
In 1918 G. K. Chesterton wrote a series of five articles for the New Witness condemning the (then current) move in England to enact more liberal divorce laws. The articles were collected and published in 1920 under the title The Superstition of Divorce (image inset), a first-edition of which was given to me as a kind gift by a very dear friend. In the book Chesterton argues at length against the…
One might imagine that the very first words of the Orthodox Liturgy consisted of a blessing pronounced by the priest saying, “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!” It is not so. The very first words of the Liturgy consist not of a blessing by the priest but of an observation by the deacon. He turns to the priest and says, “It is time for the Lord to act!”…
In 2010 country singer Miranda Lambert recorded and released a song written by Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin entitled “The House that Built Me”. It was a clever song as well as a moving one, playing on the notion that we build houses; houses do not build us. The point of the song, however, was that the house the singer once lived in did build her— i.e. it was responsible for the kind of girl she…
I have just finished reading the excellent and admirably honest autobiography of Anthony Hopkins entitled We Did OK, Kid. Hopkins seems to have been (he is still alive) one of those people who grew wiser, better, and kinder with age. Throughout the book, however, I thought I could discern a life suffused with loneliness and sadness.
When I was a young man and a new teenage convert to the Christian Faith through the Jesus People movement I believed whatever I read in a book as long as it was written by someone with letters after their name. Yep: I was that dumb. And so when I first read an article written by S.G.F. Brandon saying that Jesus was a Zealot, I was shaken in my faith and thrown for a loop. In my distress I turned…
Eva Mozes Kor was a Jewish girl, born in Romania to Alexander and Jaffa Mozes, the only Jewish residents in the area. She had three siblings, one of whom was her twin sister Miriam. Her parents and two older sisters were gassed in Auschwitz; she survived because, along with her twin sister, she was the subject of medical experiments that Josef Mengele was performing on twins there. After the camp…
Not too long ago I wrote a blog piece entitled “Music Hath Charms” in which I argued for the softening and transformational nature of music (adding a plug for choir directors with the suggestion they were mostly all underpaid). One person who read the piece called my attention to some (shall we say) less edifying music and said, “What about this music?” I replied: “Good point.” My respondent was…
Recently I was scrolling through the website of a famously-liberal denomination which quickly became excruciatingly boring because it was so predictable. In the early 1980s my (then) Anglican bishop the Right Reverend H. V. R. Short described the group as “humanism with God-talk” and I was curious to see what it was like now. The answer: more humanism, less God-talk. The website was basically a…
In the narrative in John 5 we find a story which our Lord heals a paralytic who had been lying by the pool of Bethesda, and there is a detail there that I had missed in all the decades I had been reading that story. It is this: our Lord healed the man with a word, telling him to take up the pallet on which he had been lying and walk home. The man did so. It was, St. John informs us, a Sabbath when…
