Dear Lord, have mercy on us and hear our petitions. For we beg thee in all solemnity that there may be peace, deliverance, forgiveness and love among Thy servants in Russia and the Ukraine, so that there may be unity in the Orthodox Church and that Orthodox Christians may live together in...
Much of the wisdom of Scripture is conveyed through prophetic typologies. St. Luke shows us with his Resurrection narrative that all Old Testament Scripture is all about Christ, and Matthew illustrates some examples, however, the majority are to be found by obvious implication.
To better...
There is a great deal of wisdom in the writings of the legendary Russian Orthodox hierarch, who was miraculously delivered from a life of homosexual perversion in the notorious decadence of San Francisco’s North Beach in the 1950s, to a life of holy celibacy, founding the austere St. Herman of...
A Synodal and Patriarchal Letter.
To All Our Children, Protected by God, of the Holy See of Antioch:
Beloved:
You must have heard of the continuous efforts for decades by our Church with the sister Syrian Orthodox Church to foster a better knowledge and understanding of both Churches, whether...
A member wrote this to me in a thread on an unrelated topic:
To which I replied
I would liken it to an orange, a delicious fresh fruit which you won’t starve if you don’t eat, but which is extremely spiritually healthy to consume, for in doing it, you are upholding the divinely inspired...
So I think this is an interesting question, worthy of reflection. Now, my own answer to this is a conditional yes, but only on matters which relate to Biblical theology.
Now, before I begin with a discussion of acceptable cases, based on current events and historical precedents, I think it is...
This originated as a reply to a thread, but grew a bit too large, so I made it a blog post.
Indeed, it is true that Roman Pagans accused the early Christians of cannibalism, based on a misunderstanding of the Eucharist. Pagan accusations of gross sexual immorality were probably the result of...
I thought, having recently felt compelled to state the following history in a few different topics, for those unfamiliar with the three great televangelists, Dr. James Kennedy, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, and Rev. Robert Schuller, or the important work done in the Soviet Union by Billy Graham, the...
Apophatic theology, known as the Via Negativa in Latin, and apophatic language involves the use of negations to express divine things, for example, God is unchanging, God cannot be circumscribed, there is no place where God is not, there is nothing that God does not know, and there is no limit...
To quote Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky’s classic Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, translated from Russian into English by the great penitent, scholar and abbot Fr. Seraphim Rose, because of God’s inscrutability and existence above and distinct from all of Creation,
“...one may speak only of the...
In response to a member who erroneously suggested Jesus Christ was the name of the Trinity, I replied with the following Triadological and Christological treatise:
YHWH is God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The names of the Son are the Only-Begotten, Firstborn of All Creation (although He is...
This sacrament has been of huge benefit to me. It has freed me from guilt, assisted me in bereavement following the death of my father, and delivered me from a lifelong irrational fear and hatred of hearses, among other spiritual benefits.
There are two ways to do confession, the first being...
I have come to believe the traditional Western soteriological concepts of satisfaction atonement and penal substitutionary atonement are a novel and incorrect interpretation of what Christ did for us on the Cross. By novel, I mean of course that the former is nearly a thousand years old, and...
I recently wrote in the course of replying to a thread a lengthy post reflecting on the startling accuracy of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, which I feel I should preserve here for future reference.
Introduction
An honorable member argued correctly the Bible is not a science...
A large number of Christians throughout history, aware of their sin, have given away their material wealth entirely to pursue a simple Gospel-centered life of prayer, starting with the hermit Saint Anthony in the early fourth century, when the Diocletian Persecution was still active, who...