Freedom of the Press and Accountability

I was listening to National Public Radio and heard Audie Cornish’s interview,  Helen Thomas Marks 50 Years at the White House, with 89 year old Journalist Helen Thomas who was part of the White House press corps for many years.

I found Ms. Thomas’ comments about the press, and the presidential candidates and then presidents’ reaction to the press to be interesting and insightful to how some in the Orthodox world have reacted to OCAnews.org.

Thomas said that presidents “hate the press really. They need the press during a campaign and they really work to get their attention. But after, once they’re in the White House the iron curtain comes down. … Presidents don’t like to have news conferences. They’re president.  How dare you question them or their motives?”

Candidates pursuing office cannot ever get enough press coverage or attention.  Candidates in office hate the press for questioning them or holding them accountable.   It is apparently a trait of leadership, even religious leadership, for as we have seen bishops too do not like to have to defend or explain their actions or inertia and resent being questioned, feeling that the “hierarchical principle” means they are not accountable to anyone for what they do or don’t do.

And while that attitude may have worked well in traditional Orthodox cultures where information was almost completely controlled by the ruling few, it does not fit well in the American context.  Thomas’ attitude though very well reflects the common American attitude that the freedom of the press guarantees us a right to know.  What does the press have to do when presidents refuse to explain their decisions or resist having to give an account for their actions?

“… you have to struggle harder to convince them that this is the country with freedom of the press and every public official is very accountable. Everything they do is accountable to the American people and that’s why were there.  We’re the watchdogs.  And I think everything belongs in the public domain practically, except for where the atomic arsenal is.”

That is what church leadership also has to remember about being the Church in America, rather than in some “traditionally Orthodox country.”  We are a country that values the freedom of the press and which believes every public official is accountable, and that the citizenry should be informed about what leadership is doing.  We see our bishops as public figures, not as the Wizard of Oz hiding behind a curtain, ordering us to pay no attention to what they are doing but only to obey them.   This is part of the tension Orthodox leadership feels in our country.  If we are going to be the Orthodox Church in America, rather than say a Diaspora Church Abroad, we have to find the way to deal with American attitudes toward accountability, hypocrisy, integrity and transparency.

Freedom of the press means that organizations which claim to be public are also open to scrutiny by the public and even to investigation by concerned reporters.   The OCA’s adoption of “Best Practices”, clergy sexual misconduct policies,  and other measures of accountability may seem foreign to the Church in traditionally Orthodox countries, but if we are not to remain a foreign Diaspora in our own country, we must be prepared to open our administrative practices to public scrutiny.     If we are the Church, we have nothing to hide and everything to reveal.  If we are not trustworthy, having integrity, as well as transparent and open to inquirers, then we have little to commend us to this culture.  The ever expanding media outlets – the Internet, WebPages and blogs, require integrity, openness, trustworthiness.  In fact that is all that commends us or anyone on the Internet.  Either we will be open and truthful and people will see us as such, or they will quickly marginalize us by looking for other sites on the web for spiritual nurture.   The Church grew rapidly in its early centuries because of its “witness” through the lives of its membership.  That sense of our being trustworthy witnesses to the Kingdom is an essential part of evangelism.  The American reliance of a free press may help restore within the church a sense of the importance of being reliable witnesses to the Kingdom.

Some may say that the Church existed long before ideas of the freedom of the press came around and did just fine without such freedom and/or reporting.  The Church has successfully managed to incarnate itself into many different cultures in the world.  In each culture the Church preserved its unchanging message by recognizing the differences in cultural attitudes and then adapting itself to these differences.  Whether the Church was under the pagan Roman Empire, Orthodox Byzantium or Russia, under Islam, Communism or settled in “the West”, it has adapted itself to the cultures in order to preserve the Gospel unchanged.  The freedom of the press is part of cultural background of America.  It is not inconsistent with the Gospel and can in fact help us maintain and prove our trustworthiness as witnesses to the Gospel.

Being the Prodigal Child

An excerpt from Luke 15:11-32,   “The Parable of the Prodigal Son”

The Prodigal Child and the Forgiving Father

Then the Lord told this parable: “There was a man who had two sons; and the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.’ And he divided his living between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in loose living. And when he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country, and he began to be in want. So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate; and no one gave him anything.  But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my  father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.”‘ And he arose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’  But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry;  for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to make merry.

 

Archimandrite Meletios Weber wrote that in effect each of us is the Prodigal child:

“When we are present before God, we stand as if our potential had already been realized and we were now taking our places in the Kingdom yet to come.   Feelings of distance form God mix with feelings of belonging to Him.  As we stand in church at the Divine Liturgy, we are simultaneously Adam knocking on the gates of Paradise, and the prodigal son being received back into full communion as a fully accepted member of the family of heaven.”   (BREAD & WATER, WINE & OIL, p 92)

In the book ST. SILOUAN THE ATHONITE (p. 348), St. Silouan is quoted as saying about repentance:

 “If all men would repent and keep God’s commandments, there would be paradise on earth, for the ‘Kingdom of Heaven is within us.’  …  To the man who repents, the Lord grants paradise and the Kingdom eternal with Himself.  In His great mercy He remembers not our sins, just as He overlooked the sins of the thief on the cross.” 

God Questions His Creation: Introduction (A)

Foreword

The first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, so Bishop Kallistos Ware tells us, were described by St. Gregory of Nyssa as “not so much history as ‘doctrines in the guise of narrative.’”   It is not whether the Genesis creation story is literally true which is essential, but what is of absolute importance is the truth which the story tells.  We learn from this how the Fathers of the Church looked far beyond any literal reading of the Scripture to seek the fullness of truth that God reveals to humanity.  Genesis is important to us not so much for its human history as because it reveals the doctrines of God.    As for God, He conveys His revelation to us in narrative, history, parable, poetry, spoken word, symbol, typology, pre-figuring, sign, written word and in a host of other ways.

Genesis 1 opens with a bang – not the Big Bang by which astrophysicists claim the universe came into existence, but with a very intense theological revelation.  The Book opened with God, the main character of the creation story (the only character!) creating the center stage upon which the creative poetrywhich He will recite brings the entire cosmos into existence.  In Genesis 1, the Word of God is the actor in the narrative, not the narrator himself.  God “clothes” His active love in words which bring the physical universe into existence.  God’s words becoming physical reality will culminate in the New Testament when the Word became flesh and God actually enters into history and into the world which He created.  The incarnation of the Word changes everything and yet it is only the culminating completion of what God started “in the beginning.”.

Christ Pantocrator

God originally clothed humans in glory, and at least by the understanding of the early Christian, it is precisely this garment which humanity lost when it sinned against the Lord.    Sin led to God exchanging the garment of glory in which He originally clothed the humans for the garments of skin.  Such was the Fall of humanity – we lost something vital and beautiful.   The world we now live in is not the Garden of Paradise God originally planted for us nor where He intended us to reside. 

Genesis 4-11 is completely the postlapsarian world (terms in bold print are defined in the Glossary)  – a look at humanity immediately after Eve and Adam had committed that original sin against God and were expelled from Paradise.  These early chapters of Genesis place us in the world as we know it, but they do not intend to leave us here for they are written with a sense of motion.  They are moving us to and through the events which ultimately culminate in Christ coming into the world.  In this sense Genesis 4-11 might be described as the precursor or prequel to the story of the incarnation of Christ.     

It is only with the incarnation of the Word of God that glory is restored to humanity, something which the Orthodox commemorate at each Saturday evening Vespers with the Prokeimeon, “The Lord is king, he is clothed in majesty.”  It is a hymn of the incarnation in which the flesh is not glorious but is glorified by the God-man putting it on.   It is the Word of God putting on flesh which bestows majesty to that flesh with which He has clothed Himself.   Christ is God in the flesh working to undo the effects that ancestral sin has had on all humanity.   Each Saturday evening at Vespers we celebrate the fact that God has not left us in the world of Genesis 4-11 but has in fact begun the process of salvation in which His Kingdom breaks into this fallen world giving us hope for the future and a reason to love and obey Him in this world.

However, to understand the salvation given to us in Jesus Christ, we do need to understand the world to which God sent the first humans when He expelled them from Paradise.   In Genesis 4-11 the story of creation is going to become decidedly more focused on the humans rather than on the Creator as God recedes into the background (or into the heavens, if you will).  God will play an active role in the story, but in some ways the story is less God’s story and more the story of God’s creation and of the creation’s relationship to its Creator God. 

The same narrator who described the creation of the cosmos “in the beginning,” continues with his reporting of events.  The narrator offers us no editorial comment about what he is describing, very little moralizing.  His task is descriptive not prescriptive.  It is our task as the readers of or listeners to the Scriptures to understand their meaning which is derived from the big picture – the entirety of Genesis and of the Old and New Testaments.  “When you read Holy Scripture, perceive its hidden meanings,” as St. Mark the Ascetic (5^th Cent) said.  “For whatever was written in past times was written for our instruction (Rom 15:4)… Those who do not consider themselves under obligation to perform all Christ’s commandments study the law of God in a literal manner, understanding neither what they say nor what they affirm (1Tim 1:7).  Therefore they think that they can fulfil it by their own works.”     St. Mark argues that those who think they can fully understand the scriptures by themselves are relying on their own works for salvation.   He argues that the Christian cannot simply read the scriptures literally, he must be willing to do what Christ has taught, and for St. Mark this will only occur in Christian community where one can see others living according to the commandments and be taught and corrected by them.  For Christians the key to understanding Genesis is found in Christ.  (St. Hilary of Poitiers wrote, “Scripture is not in the reading but in the understanding.”  In other words absolute literalism itself is insufficient for understanding the Bible).   And the key to opening the full meaning of the text comes with being willing to obey Christ within His chosen community.    Genesis is seen by Christians as bearing witness to Christ, and being fulfilled and explicated in and by Jesus Christ. (St. Augustine claimed, “the New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and the Old Testament lies open in the New.”) Thus to read Genesis apart from Christ is to miss its main purpose and meaning.  Our main way of reading scripture in Christ is to do it within His Body, the Church.  Thus my reflections on Genesis include quotes from the New Testament and from the Patristic writers in which we learn how Christians inspired by God have interpreted the text of Genesis through the centuries. I also have included quotes from our sacramental and liturgical prayers and hymns which are related to the texts we will be studying to show how Genesis 4-11 is used in the worship of the Orthodox Church which shapes much of our understanding of the Bible.

Next:  God Questions His Creation: Introduction (B)

Prophets & Scriptures: The Continued Presence of God’s Spirit

This is the 3^rd blog in this series which began with  A Quest to Know What It Means To Be Human.    The 2^nd blog was Genesis 6:3 and John 1:32-34.   

The result of sin – the entrance of death into the human condition and the loss of the Spirit – changes the very relationship that humans have with their Creator.  The Breath/Spirit of God no longer dwells permanently in humans.  As Genesis6:3 records God says, “My Spirit shall not remain with these people forever, for they are flesh.”   Humanity loses its exclusive life in the presence of God in His Garden, and thus according to the Scriptures begins the history of humankind in our world.   The story is laden with theology, and truthfully is more about us today than about history or archeology – for the story tells us about who we are and why we live as mortals subject to death if there is a good and loving Creator.

Prophet John the Baptizer

God does not give up completely on His human creatures, for He provides a continued means for them to have relationship to Him through His Spirit.  God continues to speak to humanity through His prophets by the Holy Spirit.  The word spoken to the prophets is recorded in Scripture.  The Scriptures became for us a way to have a continued relationship with God through the Spirit; though now the Spirit is mediated first through the prophets and then through the written record of the received Word.   The prophets and then the Scriptures which record their word are inspired – God breathed into them.   God’s people of the Old Covenant breathed in these Scriptures and were inspired by them.  The Scriptures became the place where humanity could still breathe the breath of God which no longer abided permanently in humankind.   Thus the Scriptures served as an intermediary, an inspired one, between us and God – they contain God’s revelation to us; in the incarnation of the Word, they become for us a restoration of our relationship with God.  Our souls remain nurtured by God by the Spirit through the Scriptures and through the chosen people of God who authenticate the Scriptures, witnessing to their power and truthfulness.  The human effort to experience God’s Spirit is also recorded in these same inspired Scriptures.  Israel and then the Church were given the Scriptures so that we could exactly maintain the human relationship through the Spirit with the Creator.

In Christ, the Spirit, whom God had withdrawn from humanity and not permitted to reside permanently with us, is restored to humanity.  In Christ the Spirit descends on the man Jesus, AND REMAINS!  In this theandric event of incarnate salvation, the Scriptures – which served as the means through which we had continued relationship with God’s Spirit – are also revealed as a witness to Christ.  Our relationship to God through the Spirit which was limited to the Scriptures – God’s Word – now is fully revealed and realized in the incarnation of the Word of God.  The Jews were entrusted with these oracles (Romans 3:2) but erred in failing to understand the oracles were but a prefiguring and a witness to the incarnate Word of God.   Because they thought the Scriptures were the final gift of God, they failed to see that the Scriptures witnessed to the Word incarnate  (John 5:39-40).   The Jews thought having the Scriptures gave them an eternal place in God’s plan, while the reality was the Scriptures were intended to prepare them for the incarnation of the Word.  

“…our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory?”   (2 Corinthians 3:5-7)

The Annunciation

Now, the Word becomes flesh (John 1:14) and humanity once again receives God’s Spirit and relates to God through the Spirit.  The Word is incarnate both of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.   The Theotokos accepted the role God intended for Israel – to become the people in whom His Word becomes flesh.  The written Word was a prefiguring of the incarnation of the Word in the flesh, but it was not salvation – had it been, then Christ was unnecessary.  As it is the incarnation of the Word of God restored to humanity the Spirit of God.  Additionally, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the Son of God prepared humanity for the coming of God’s Spirit upon all flesh at Pentecost.   The role of Scriptures in salvation is now revealed as well – it is not sola scriptura, for Scripture bears witness to Christ, and now in Christ we receive once again the breath of God as God created us to do.  As Fr. Florovsky wrote (“The Work of the Holy Spirit in Revelation”, THE CHRISTIAN EAST, Vol  XIII, No. 2 (1932):

“God speaks so that man should hear Him.  God created man in His image and likeness that man should listen for His Voice and Word, should hear it, and, even more, that he should treasure it, remember it, and keep it.” 

“The scriptures transmit and preserve for us the Divine Voice in the tongue of man.  The scriptures transmit and preserve for us the Divine Word such as it had been heard, such as it sounded in the receptive soul of man.  The mystery of Divine inspiration is not only that God spoke to man, but also that man was listening to God and heard Him.” 

 “… Therein lies the significance of the Old Testament Divine visions, of the Old Testament Revelations.  In them there is a certain essential anthropomorphism and this not so much because of the weakness of human understanding, or from a sense of ‘adaptability,’ but as a foretaste of the coming incarnation.   It is already in the Old Testament that the Divine Word becomes human, is incarnated in the human tongue. … What is human is not suppressed or swept away by Divine inspiration; it is only transfigured.  The supernatural does not go counter to what is natural.”

God created humans precisely to receive/to hear His revelation.  Not only could we hear God, but God gifted us to record this divine Word so that future generations as well could now experience the revelation!    We are given by God the ability to experience the transcendent (that which is not human, but divine) and to abstract from it meaning.       It wasn’t so much that God took His time to make His revelation known, but that we humans needed the time to mature in our understanding of the world and of God.    One only has to think about the human understanding of mathematics such as reported in the book UNKNOWN QUANTITY: A REAL AND IMAGINARY HISTORY OF ALGEBRA.  Humans have  a unique ability to think in ever greater abstract terms and to derive meaning from the abstract.    That God’s word could be heard by some, and then recorded for all to hear is a growing understanding of God.  That these same written words – a concrete expression of God’s word (written in stone!) – could then be both our continued experience of God’s Spirit and a prefiguring of God’s plan takes  humanity to the depth of God’s thought and the height of theology.

Next:   Florovsky:  Scripture and Revelation

God Questions His Creation

God Questions His Creation:  A Look at Genesis 4-11

In the autumn of 2007 I decided to continue a project I had begun earlier in the year – writing a series of reflections on the Book of Genesis.  During Great Lent of 2007, I wrote daily reflections on Genesis 1-3, which I emailed to my parishioners at St. Paul the Apostle Orthodox Church, Dayton, Ohio.  That effort resulted in those reflections being collected and published as the book QUESTIONING GOD: A LOOK AT GENESIS 1-3. 

The response from those who read the reflections was positive and some encouraged me to continue writing such meditations.  I took up that work deciding to write daily reflections on Genesis 4-11 and emailed them to my parishioners each day of the Nativity Fast in 2007.  This is a collection of those reflections which I am now reproducing in this series of blogs.  Since during Great Lent, we Orthodox read through Genesis, I thought this an appropriate time to release these meditations.

These reflections are not a dogmatic treatise.  I did not set out to write an exposition of the Orthodox Faith.  Rather, the ideas expressed herein are my reflections that arose from repeatedly reading and praying through Genesis 4-11 during a 4 month period.  As in the earlier work, sometimes I provide no answers but recorded questions that came to my mind about the text.   That is for me part of the reflection process – forming questions that the text suggests.  As I studied the text I recorded ideas that I found in books I was reading about Genesis.  I scoured Patristic commentaries, and liturgical texts for references to the events and people recorded in these scriptural chapters.  Some of what occurred to me is simply word and theme associations to other Scripture passages or liturgical texts which I added to my reflections.

Consequently the meditations which follow the scripture passages are a collection of ideas, not a continuous thread.  Each paragraph following the quoted scripture verse is a separate thought and not meant to be read continuously like the paragraphs of a novel.  My hope is that you the reader might also find reason to pause and think about the scripture to which each reflection refers.  While I hope these reflections do touch upon issues of contemporary concern and will help the reader wrestle with living the Christian life, it is also my intention that you will be inspired to ask questions about the scriptures and to further reflect on them yourself.

It is neither wrong nor necessarily bad that the writings of the Bible trouble us, or challenge our thinking, or cause us to seek further clarification and understanding.  All of these things can be part of healthy spiritual growth and maturation of faith.   I hope that you will come to see the Scriptures as a rich and abundant garden which one enters to enjoy the variety of scents, colors and tastes, and to become nourished by the life-giving fruit.

I do welcome your thoughts and comments in the next months as I produce this series of blogs.  I intend eventually to make the entire series of blogs electronically available in a PDF format.  If at some point you think you would like to purchase a copy of these blogs as a book – let me know.  I would consider self -publishing them as a book if enough people are interested in purchasing a copy.

A Glossary of Terms for GOD QUESTIONS HIS CREATION is at https://frted.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/gqhc_glossary.pdf

The bibliography I used for GOD QUESTIONS HIS CREATION is at https://frted.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/gqhc_bibliograph.pdf

Next:  Introduction (A)

Chrysostom on the Scriptures

ALL SCRIPTURE IS INSPIRED BY GOD    (2 Timothy 3:16)

Three quotes from St. John Chrysostom on  reading, listening to, or talking about the Scriptures:

“The mouths of the inspired authors are the mouth of God, after all; such a mouth would say nothing idly—so let us not be idle in our listening, either . . . Pay precise attention, however: the reading out of the Scriptures is the opening of the heavens.”

“Any time must be considered suitable for discourse on spiritual topics.  If we have a precise realization of this, we will be able while relaxing at home, both before eating and after eating, to take the Scriptures in our hands and gain benefit from them and provide spiritual nourishment for our soul . . . This is our salvation, this is spiritual treasure, this security.  If we thus strengthen ourselves each day—by reading, by listening, by spiritual discourse—we will be able to remain unconquered, and render the snares of the devil ineffectual.”

“Let us not simply imprint this on our minds, but also discuss it constantly with one another in our get-togethers; let us constantly revive the memory of this story both with our wives and with the children.  In fact, if you want to talk about a king, see, there is a king here; if about soldiers, about a household, about political affairs, you will find a great abundance of these things in the Scriptures.  These narratives bring the greatest benefit: it is impossible – impossible, I say—for a soul nourished on these stories ever to manage to fall victim to passion.”

Genesis 6:3 and John 1:32-34

This is the 2^nd blog in this series which began with A Quest to Know What It Means To Be Human.   In this blog I will present an anthropological question which intrigued me early on in my Christian sojourn.   In future blogs I will turn my attention to comments by Fr. Georges Florovsky concerning scripture, the Spirit, revelation and the Church.

While most of the discussion of ancestral sin or original sin centers on Genesis 3 and the Fall of Eve and Adam, Genesis 6:3 offers a further word on the effects of the Fall on humanity.

Then the LORD said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”

Expulsion from Paradise

God’s decision to withdraw His breath/spirit (ruah, pneuma) from humanity and not allow it to abide in humans forever, but only  temporarily, has implication for biblical anthropology.   But what these implications are, and how they might differ from God’s decision that death is the end result of sin, or that humans cannot live in Paradise, is not spelled out.  It is not a theme taken up explicitly by the Old or New Testament writers.  St. Paul certainly acknowledges the sin of Eve and Adam in bringing mortality to all humanity, but he does not comment on Genesis 6:3.   St. Paul according to modern biblical scholars is among the very first to focus on the sin of Adam and Eve and its theological implications; for the story of Adam and Eve prior to Paul played no great role in the Jewish Scriptures and Eve and Adam are rarely mentioned in the canonical writings of Israel outside of Genesis 2-4 (Eve is not mentioned by name outside of Genesis 2-4 in the canonical Jewish Scriptures, though is mentioned once in Tobit and twice by St. Paul.  Adam plays no role in the canonical Jewish scriptures outside of Genesis 2-5, but is frequently mentioned in the Jewish Apocrypha – found in the Septuagint and thus the Christian scriptures –  and is referenced 8 times in the New Testament, 6 by St. Paul).   St. Paul clearly sees the death and resurrection of Christ as being God’s plan of salvation in dealing with human sin and mortality which entered into the world with Eve and Adam.

However, in the Gospel tradition there is this unusual story:

The next day he (John the Forerunner and Baptizer) saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him.  I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”   (John 1:29-34  NRSV)

The One who takes away the sins of the world turns out to be the very One upon whom the Spirit descends and REMAINS.  What is the significance of the Spirit remaining on Christ – to what precedent does this event refer?    The very sign by which John the Baptizer is told he will recognize the Christ is that he will see the Spirit remaining on him.  (The Greek word for “remain” in the Septuagint’s Genesis 6  is the same root word as “remain” in John 132-34).  Does the evangelist John have in mind the undoing of the curse by God as stated in Genesis 6:3?  The new creation ushered in by God’s Kingdom breaking into the world in Jesus begins with the restoration of humanity to it’s natural human state – in communion with and in possession of the Spirit of God.    The Feast of Theophany not only reveals the Trinity to us, it also reveals what it is to be fully human – to have the breath/spirit of God remain in us as God intended for humanity from the beginning when He formed the first human being.

In Genesis 2:7, God breathes the breath of life (= His Spirit) into the face of the man which God had formed from the dust of the earth, and the man became a living soul, a living being.  It is this soul which is the very locus of Divinity touching and interfacing with the created humanity.   God’s breath/spirit (the Greek and Hebrew word can be translated either way)  is divinity touching humanity.  The soul is the interface between the created world and the Divine Life.  

After the catastrophic rejection of God’s Lordship by Eve and Adam and their disobedience of his command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of life, God’s warning about death becoming part of the human condition comes true.  But it is not physical death which first strikes Adam and humanity, but spiritual death.  The humans become afraid of their Creator (Genesis 3:10 – would a little fear of God have been good for them a little earlier?  God apparently didn’t intend for His humans to live in fear of Him).    The humans are expelled from God’s Garden of Delight and from His presence.    Then as Genesis6:3 records God says, “My Spirit shall not remain with these people forever, for they are flesh.”  The human creatures, male and female made in the image and likeness of God no longer are to have God’s Spirit permanently dwelling in them.  However we conceive and understand the Genesis narrative – as history, poetry, symbolism, typology or a prefiguring – we do know that something happened to humanity.  The result of sin – the entrance of death into the human condition and the loss of the Spirit – changes the very relationship that humans have with their Creator.  The Breath/Spirit of God no longer dwells permanently in humans.

Next:  Prophets & Scriptures:  The Continued Presence of God’s Spirit

Archbishop Job: In Memoriam – A Christian End to Our Life

“For a Christian end to our life, peaceful… let us ask of the Lord.” 

A 40th Day Memoriam

Archbishop Job of Chicago

 I first encountered Archbishop Job in the 1970’s when he was still Fr. John of Black Lick, PA, at a youth retreat held at St. John’s in Hiram, OH.  He had a heart for the teens and young people of the church, willing to give of his time to be with them.  While I can thus say I knew him for many years, my contacts with him were infrequent;  I cannot say I ever felt close to him. 

I have a few “snapshots” of him in my mind through the years.  1) As a bishop he liked being with the youth of the church and championed youth ministry.  Some  (and sometimes critically) felt he actually was more at home with the youth than with the adults.   2)  He came to our diocese as bishop and struggled for years with regret for that move, often seeming lost in the past.   He was not effective as a leader, and left many feeling frustrated with him.    3) He came to my house spending an entire day in the midst of my family’s own crisis, offering his support and prayers in a situation for which there was nothing he could do.    4)  He became a heroic figure in the midst of the OCA’s scandal, a scandal which I note that many in the OCA do not want to acknowledge in their own eulogies of Archbishop Job.  He was way out of his comfort zone in questioning authority, and only with great reluctance came to refuse to continue to grease the wheels turning the OCA.    5) It was the response by the rest of the church to the scandal which wore him down. 

He was a bishop of the church, but reluctantly so.   He did not relish the position.  He didn’t like administration.  He was attuned to music, icons and youth.  He practiced avoidance of problems and issues.  He loved the hierarchical liturgy, but wished it would be someone other than himself who was the central figure to the liturgical drama.  He was by his own admission, ill prepared and under educated to be a bishop.  He acknowledged that he was not a great intellect; publicly, during the scandal when accused of being “clever” for the “cagey” way he asked his question, he quipped honestly that no one had ever accused him of being clever before.   He wasn’t; yet, he was honest enough to know it.   Indeed, he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but he was a lone luminary in a very dark period of the OCA’s history.

In many ways, he stumbled onto his question, “are the allegations true?”  To be honest, it wasn’t a moment of great insight or brilliant bravado.  He was simple, and he simply wanted to know because he was not sure.  He wanted with all his heart to believe in the leadership of the OCA and his fellow bishops on the synod.   He waited for them to do the right thing, and couldn’t understand why they didn’t.   He wanted to be at peace with them; he was totally willing to forgive them, and he had no ambitions to gain position over them.  He was in this sense a true Christian in a way that some of those now retired bishops will never understand.  In one conversation I had with him in what were for him the most horrible days of his life, I could only say to him, “Let them take away your episcopacy, but never let them take your Christianity from you.”  He didn’t, even when he had to humble himself before those who were devious or deviant.   

In the end, even when investigations revealed the depth and breadth of the scandal in the OCA’s chancery and synod, he wished to be reconciled to those he still saw as his brothers in Christ.  They mocked him and tried to destroy him, but he never really understood them in that way.  He was not clever, devious or ambitious, and he saw those around him through those same vindictiveless eyes.  He wanted peace and stood as a rock in the midst of the crashing waves of the storm in order to find that concord –  storms do eventually subside and pass on and the steadfast rock remains standing.     As the scandal and its resolution dragged on and lost energy in its unwinding, his desire to return to ministry, to the things he really loved about the Church, grew.  He wanted to retire – or probably more true, he wanted to get to those things he loved about the church but couldn’t participate in as bishop, especially music and iconography.  In a sense he wanted to do what many of us priests do – immerse himself in parish life  and distance himself from the church beyond the parish.

In the end, as I noted in the last meeting in which I sat with him on December 11, his desire to be at peace with his antagonists was so evident.  He carried no grudges, no vengefulness, no vindictiveness against these folk, perhaps because he continued to wonder if the allegations were true.  He found no pleasure, no joy in having carried the day.  He was most joyful that he had been given opportunity through the St. Tikhon’s Investigative Committee to meet with one of the disgraced former metropolitans one last time for more than opportunity to know the truth it was a time to find some reconciliation with him. 

He was indeed a man of peace, and though not clever, he showed himself to have a Christian heart: even on the cross he forgave.  Now he has entered into that rest and peace which he could not find in his episcopal ministry, but which he believed to the end was the goal of being Orthodox.  He did understand a Christian end to his life – one can enter into Christ’s kingdom without being a bishop, but not without being a Christian. 

  He was a true witness to what it takes to live at peace with others –  self denial, kenotic love, self sacrifice and the willingness to take up one’s cross to follow Christ.

 See Also my earlier Tribute to Archbishop Job

A Quest To Know What It Means To Be Human

When I was a student at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in the mid-1970’s I had a great interest in understanding, “what does it mean to be human?”  I had started my college career as a chemistry major (and considered myself an atheist) and then became more interested in anthropology, sociology and psychology.  The more I became interested in the humanities as well as in humanity, the more I became open to theology.  The fact that theology and science were antagonistically colliding and separating in academia was not much of a concern to me – I was trying to pull my realms of knowledge together even if some felt this an inconceivable impossibility.  In the early 1970’s I wrote a paper in an anthropology class at Ohio State on Teilhard de Chardin, only to discover that teleology of any kind was not considered science, even though Teilhard was a well known and respected anthropologist.   I was trying to pull together pieces of the intellectual world around me, while these same forces were pushing away from each other as forcefully as Newton’s Third Law of Motion suggests.  I had come to believe that the scientific effort to understand the world while completely dismissing even remotely theological ideas was an incomplete way of comprehending the universe.  Humans were in fact more than mere chemical reactions; even though we could precisely determine the chemical composition of a human,  that in itself was inadequate for explaining what a human is or what it means to be human.  And so I left my secular pursuit to look at humanity through the lens of theology. 

At seminary I discovered there was not much interest in science –  Orthodoxy was keeping a distance from heterodoxy and science wasn’t even on the radar.   While the faculty was not promoting  biblical literalism, there was an obvious tension when secular or heterodox biblical scholarship was brought to bear on various scripture passages.  The faculty might be engaging the intellectual world all around as they traveled throughout the country representing Orthodoxy, but the seminary itself was preserved as a tiny Orthodox island in a vast sea of American, Western, modern, Enlightenment, heterodox thinking.   Roman Catholic Teilhard de Chardin was no more welcomed here than in secular academia.  I was struggling with how to bring together the knowledge I had from science and my secular education with the knowledge given through theology, even while others were working hard to keep these realms of knowing separate from each other.

I had a question which I wanted to work on while I was at seminary, but the pursuit of that question was visibly discouraged.  My question:  Was John 1:32-34, John the Forerunner’s witness that the Spirit descended and REMAINED on Jesus the undoing of God’s removing the Spirit from humanity in Genesis 6:3?   My proposal that this be my thesis project was rejected, though I wasn’t told why.

I am guessing now that the reason the faculty was not willing for me to explore my question had to do with their own desire to quash any search that even remotely related to Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s Sophiology.  I knew nothing back then of the controversies swirling around Sophiology or Bulgakov.   But having read some of his works more recently, it struck me that he was the reason I was not given encouragement back then to pursue my interest, for certainly had I pursued the study I would have soon come to Bulgakov’s writings as they were perhaps among the few directly related to my question.  But having read (though not comprehended) Bulgakov now, I do not find the idea of Sophiology attractive nor of particular interest to my question about the relationship of Genesis 6:3 to John 1:32-34, nor to what I still find intriguing about the question, “what does it mean to be human?”

Fr. Georges Florovsky

There are a certain group of Russian Orthodox Christian intellectuals of the last 2 centuries whose writings are immensely attractive and persuasive to me.  I thank them for having made it possible for me to find my way to Christ and the Holy Trinity.  Their ideas certainly were quite active in St. Vladimir’s Seminary in the 1970’s as some of the faculty there were certainly steeped in this tradition.   They were for me a lifeblood – for they did attempt to tie together the cosmos which we experience and attempt to comprehend through science with the knowledge offered through the social sciences and theology.  I am forever grateful to all of these people for their efforts.  You can read about some of them in recent books like Michael Plekon’s TRADITION ALIVE: ON THE CHURCH AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE IN OUR TIME, Nicholas Afanasiev’s THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SPIRIT , or  THE TEACHINGS OF MODERN CHRISTIANITY ON LAW, POLITICS AND HUMAN NATURE.  

I intend in this series of blogs to explore my questions about what it means to be human and the relationship of Genesis 6:3 and John 1:32-34.  I will do so by especially concentrating on the writings of Fr. Georges Florovsky who certainly is in that Russian Orthodox Christian intellectual tradition which drew me to Christianity as I tried to understand what it is to be human.  I will be focusing on two of Florovsky’s writings:  BIBLE, CHURCH, TRADITION: AN EASTERN ORTHODOX VIEW (especially chapters 2-5), and on his article “The Work of the Holy Spirit in Revelation”,  which appeared in THE CHRISTIAN EAST, Vol  XIII, No. 2 (1932).  [I want to give a special thanks to Eleana Silk, Librarian at St. Vladimir’s Seminary for her help in locating this article].   

Next:  Genesis 6:3 and John 1:32-34

Sanctity of Human Life Sunday (2010)

 

Human Fetus at 6 months

As we remember today the Sanctity of Human Life, I offer some thoughts from Walter Brueggemann taken from his book,  TEXTS UNDER NEGOTIATION: THE BIBLE AND POSTMODERN IMAGINATION.  In the mother’s womb, a miracle takes place – a child comes into being and upon birth breathes the breath that God breathes.  Inspiration is natural to humans from the beginning!

“The text that we know best concerning the origin of the human person is Gen. 2:7: ‘God formed the human persons,’ who are a combination of ordinary ‘dust of the ground’ and the breath that God breathes.  Israel knows about babies and about birth.  They had watched the moment of spanking in which the newborn inhales breath and in that wondrous moment begins to live and cry and eat… and they were amazed.  The baby received it, took it in.  Such breath is a gift given from outside the baby and only received by the baby.  All our science has not much advanced beyond the wonder that what is needed for life is indeed given.

A more specific statement of this fragile wonder is Ps. 139:13-16:

For it was you who formed my inward parts;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works;

that I know very well.

 My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

In your book were written

all the days that were formed for me,

when none of them as yet existed.

 The psalmist imagines God being present in the very formation of the embryo, as it is formed, knit together, intricately woven, so that only God beheld my ‘unformed substance.’  The language is almost eerie in its depth of speaking of the indescribable mystery and hiddenness of new life.”  (pp 30-31)

God is part of the creation of each child, His hand is present and active in forming each human being, His breath inspires and gives life, and He imprints His image upon each human even in the mother’s womb.   For each child to survive in the womb, humanity must be willing to extend to that totally dependent being its mercy and love.  We are completely vulnerable before birth, and totally defenseless.  Only if humans recognize their own humanity in that of the unborn will the unborn be permitted to survive.  Survival may be programmed into the genes of every species;

The Holy Family

humans however are a species that must choose to bring their offspring into existence because they have the power to end pregnancies.  For humans, the survival of our offspring is dependent on our own generosity for our children – the willingness to give them life, to share our resources with the next generation.

“The church is the primary place left in our society for the acknowledgment of our previous, undeniable weakness that depends upon uncommon gentleness and generosity.  It is that candid reality of weakness and gentleness that will in the end permit the undoing of an abusive, fearful world of the self-sufficient and the formation of a new counter-world of genuine humanness.  Note well: The claim for human fragility is not rooted in an awareness of mortality and death.  The affirmation of fragility and generosity comes not in the context of death, but in the glorious wonder of birth.  There was a time when I was not, and then by the power, goodness, and mercy of God, I was and I am!  I did not ‘evolve,’ but was loved and named by one even beyond mother and father, a self unashamed, unqualified, naked, beloved, and safe.  Let not your heart be troubled!”  (p 32)