| Today one can confidently say that the Muslim Brotherhood has no chance of taking full power in Egypt; and, most likely, if the chance does arise it will be no time soon. The elections demonstrated that the country is seriously divided and that any attempt to impose the Islamist model would cause strong resistance from both the army and secular forces – namely, those citizens who voted for former Prime Minister Hosni Mubarak Ahmed Shafiq in the second round of presidential elections. Turnout was low, but votes were divided almost equally: Mursi won by only a few percent. In the short turn, one will need to look at how relations develop between Mursi and the army and at Egypt’s international relations. I do not think that Egypt will withdraw from peace talks with Israel any time soon, although relations may cool. The Muslim Brotherhood and President Mursi cannot afford an agenda that is too radical, since Egypt’s revenues actually come from three main sources: tourism, tariffs for use of the Suez Canal, and American aid, which will continue as long as Egypt remains an element of stability and predictability in the Middle East – which includes maintaining relations with Israel. So I do not think there will be any surprises here. As for domestic policy, no sudden shifts are expected here either. Mursi will likely gradually replace officials and officers with more loyal ones, but that process will take many years. Today Mursi and his Islamist supporters are in a rather difficult situation. They are now in power and have to take responsibility for two things that bother Egyptians: security and the economic situation. In such a situation it is in the Egyptian government’s interests to defend the rights of Christians and to prevent confessional conflicts, because blame for any such conflict will now be placed on the government. Christians in Egypt are always in danger: the conflicts that took place between Muslims and Copts under Mubarak and Sadat will likely continue into the future. But I do not think there is any danger of mass repressions against the Copts. Any inter-religious violence would bring the army back to power. |
| “Regrettably, less than two years later, Patriarch Bartholomew did exactly what he had promised not to do,” the archpastor added, “In October 2018, the Synod of the Patriarchate of Constantinople made a whole number of unilateral decisions concerning the church life in Ukraine.” As Metropolitan Hilarion emphasized, it was done with complete disregard for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which from the very beginning stated its non-recognition of all these actions. “It is impossible to find explanations for the actions of the Church of Constantinople in the Orthodox canon law. They represent an evident and gross violation of the canons of the Church, Orthodox ecclesiology and the very foundations of inter-church relations. At the same time, one cannot fail to notice the presence of a non-ecclesiastical factor in the decision made at Phanar. Nobody tried and tries to conceal the exceptional role played by now former President of Ukraine in granting ‘a tomos of autocephaly’,” the DECR chairman said. Metropolitan Hilarion presented facts of seizures of church buildings of the canonical Ukrainian Church, of beatings of old men and women, of banishments of priests from the places of their ministry, of fictitious votes of territorial communities’ members in favour of “transfers” of religious communities to the schismatics. As the DECR chairman noted, the efforts to seize churches plummeted immediately after the victory of Vladimir Zelensky in the presidential elections in Ukraine; there have even been cases of taking action to prevent such abuse. “We are looking with hope to the first moves of the new leadership of our fraternal country. We hope for the establishment of peace in Ukraine, elimination of hatred and enmity, protection of the rights of believers of all confessions and non-interference in the affairs of religious communities in the country,” Metropolitan Hilarion added. Answering the question put in the title of the conference, Metropolitan Hilarion said, “Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are one spiritual space. We contest neither national self-identification of the three Slavic nations, nor the boundaries of the independent states, but we will continue our struggle for the preservation of the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church which assures spiritual unity of all Orthodox believers living within its space irrespective of their national and ethnic belonging. Simple words of the holy elder Lavrenty of Chernigov ‘Russia, Ukraine, Belarus – all these are Holy Rus’’ remain topical and resound in the hearts of millions of people.” |
| In addition to the fact that documents were published and people were able to discuss them openly in the media, we know that in the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as in other local Churches, special panels conducted open discussions of these documents (for example, scientific and practical conferences were convened to discuss misgivings and expectations of the proposed Council). Sensitive Issues I think it is extremely discourteous towards their fellow Archpastors and to God’s people to say to them something along the lines of, “We have already discussed the documents, so we’ll simply bring them to the Council and accept them.” The Council then seems to turn into some kind of convention of the Communist Party where the Political Bureau makes all the decisions and everyone else unanimously votes for it. Shouldn’t the procedure for the discussion of Council documents be different? Strictly speaking, the Council is, in fact, able to introduce changes into the documents, provided there is a consensus, which is practically impossible, as they are planning to discuss subjects that are extremely sensitive for the faithful. For example, the attitude towards the heterodox. The document does not clearly specify that the fullness of the truth exists only in Orthodoxy. So people start worrying: does that mean that we accept that fullness and truth can also exist somewhere else, somewhere outside of Orthodoxy? Does that mean we accept that we are not the only Holy Apostolic Church? An extremely sensitive issue is the question of marriage and of cohabitation outside of marriage, in particular. What does cohabitation actually mean? And, above all, what is same-sex cohabitation – is it something unlawful, unnatural, something that goes against God and humanity or is it something that we may look upon with compassion? We understand that the people in Church are often inert and passive, that they require time to be able to process some ideas and to express their opinion. Thankfully, owing to the Russian Orthodox Church, conciliar documents received a wide exposure; feedback was received; some suggestions were made. And what do we hear in return? No comment. No changes. All documents are to be presented to the Council in their present form. |
| Another cause of anti-Christian moods is the fact that some Protestants in the West, especially charismatics, have committed a deep distortion of Christianity. Regrettably, Muslims have often identified their views with common Christian ones. We can see today how leaders of various charismatic sects who name themselves Christian churches provoke people to commit ill-considered actions for the sake of their own PR image. This leads to a distortion of the image of Christianity, just as actions of Islamic sects present Islam in a corrupted form. In recent years, public and governmental organizations in Europe have given some attention to the problem of discrimination against Christians in the world, though it appears insufficient. Last June, when in Budapest I met with a representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Prof. Massimo Introvigne from Italy, who has studied this issue for several years. Last autumn, we invited him to Moscow for a conference ‘Freedom of Faith: the Problem of Discrimination and Persecution against Christians’. Quite recently an Observatory for Religious Freedom has been established in Rome. This year it will conduct a conference devoted to the protection of religious minorities in various countries. On January 20, 2011, the PACE adopted a Resolution on the Situation of Christians in the Context of Freedom of Religion, which condemns the killing and discrimination of Christian in various countries, in particular, Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Philippines. The resolution addressed to the governments and parliaments in these countries was adopted by a majority of votes. Voting for it were representatives of all the political parties present in the European Parliament. The deputies agreed to set up a standing body at the European External Action Service to monitor the religious freedom situation in the world and to present annual reports to the EU and public at large concerning the cases of infringement on freedom of conscience by authorities or public forces in various countries. |
| The head of the Syriac Orthodox Church, Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, called for the international community to work together toward a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Syria at a press conference in Laval on Friday. He said everyone was shocked by the photo of Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian boy who was photographed lying lifeless on a beach in Turkey. “Our thoughts go out to his family and to the families of all the victims. I would like to say that Alan, as horrible as his story is, there are thousands of people like him (who drowned) and there are thousands of kids like him, but their stories were not told.” Alan, along with his 5-year-old brother, Ghalib, and his mother, Rehanna, drowned when the boat they were travelling in to Greece sank. The three were buried in their hometown of Kobane in Syria on Friday, according to the Associated Press. The photo brought the Syrian refugee crisis to the forefront of the Canadian consciousness this week because the child’s uncle had applied to be sponsored and come to Canada, but the forms were returned because they were incomplete. Agencies that support refugees have been feeling the effect. “We’ve been getting all kinds of emails and requests,” said Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, a Montreal-based national umbrella organization for refugee assistance groups. “I know some of our members have been talking about how they’ve been receiving lots of calls.” “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a level of interest,” she said. “We’ve been scratching our heads for a long time. We’ve been quite discouraged by the lack of popular reaction to the scale of the crisis. But now, you feel like people are doing what we expect them to do, which is to say that this is intolerable and we want action.” Ignatius Aphrem II said average Canadians should focus on the people who are trying to stay in their communities by helping groups respond to their needs, including basic necessities like food, clothing and health care. |
| Thus VAT 4956 gives very strong support to the chronology of the NeoBabylonian era as established by the historians. Attempting to overcome this evidence, the Watch Tower Society, in the abovementioned Bible dictionary, goes on to state that, “While to some this might seem like incontrovertible evidence, there are factors greatly reducing its strength.” What are these factors? And do they genuinely reduce the strength of the evidence in this ancient tablet? (a) The first is that the observations made in Babylon may have contained errors. The Babylonian astronomers showed greatest concern for celestial events or phenomena occurring close to the horizon, at the rising or setting of the moon or the sun. However, the horizon as viewed from Babylon is frequently obscured by sandstorms. Then Professor Otto Neugebauer is quoted as saying that Ptolemy complained about “the lack of reliable planetary observations [from, ancient Babylon],” 274 However, many of the observations recorded in the diaries were not made close to the horizon, but higher up in the sky. Further, Babylonian astronomers had several means of overcoming unfavorable weather conditions. As noted earlier, the observations were performed at a number of sites in Mesopotamia. What could not be observed at one place due to clouds or sandstorms, could probably be observed somewhere else. 275 One method used to get over the difficulty of observing stars close to the horizon due to dust was to observe, instead, “the simultaneously occurring of other stars, the socalled ziqpustars,” that is, stars crossing the meridian higher up on the sky at their culmination. 276 Finally, the horizon as viewed from Babylon was not obscured by sandstorms every day, and some planetary events could be observed many days or weeks in succession, also higher up in the sky, for example, the position of Saturn which, according to our text, could be observed “in front of the Swallow [the southwest part of the Fishes].” As was pointed out above, Saturn can be observed in each of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac for about 2.5 years on the average. |
| The rate of increase of the length of a day due to slowing down of the earth’s rotation, back to the 8th century BCE, has been fixed at an average of 1.7 milliseconds per century (1.7 ms/c; Stephenson, op cit. pp. 513, 514; cf. New Scientist, 30 January 1999, pp. 3033). For this period, therefore, we are on “safe ground.” Furuli can hardly be unaware of this. Today, the gradual change in the rate of the earth’s rotation is definitely not a significant source of error when using astronomical tablets from the NeoBabylonian and Persian eras to calculate the chronology of these periods. The interpolation of intercalary months to compensate for the difference between the solar and the lunar year Arguing that the interpolation of intercalary months in the Babylonian lunisolar calendar might be another potential source of error, Furuli (p. 34) quotes Drs. Ben Zion Wacholder and David B. Weisberg, who say: “As Professor Abraham Sachs pointed out in a communication to us, some of the readings of the intercalary months recorded in Parker and Dubberstein’s tables may not be quite reliable, while a handful are admittedly hypothetical. But even assuming the essential correctness of Parker and Dubberstein’s tables, Professor Sachs maintains, the supposition of a 19year cycle prior to 386 B.C.E. may be reading into the evidence something which possibly is not there.” (Ben Zion Wacholder, Essay on Jewish Chronology and Chronography, New York, 1976, p. 67) Nothing in this statement is not also admitted by Parker and Dubberstein, as can be seen in Babylonian Chronology 626 B.C.–A.D. 75 (1956), pp. 19. As Wacholder and Weisberg further demonstrate in their work, the development of the 19year standard scheme of intercalary months was a gradual process begun in the 7th century. The final stage took place in the 5th and early 4th centuries, when the seven intercalary months of the 19year cycle were fixed in years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14,17, and 19. This process is also clear in PD. Furuli concludes: “This means that calculations based on the Julian calendar can be wrong as much as 44 days or even more if the intercalary months were not added regularly.” (p. 35) This conclusion is based on the unlikely supposition that sometimes four years could pass before an intercalary montli was added. But the weight of evidence, based on the economic and the astronomical texts, shows that this never happened after 564 BCE. (See the updated tables of documented intercalary months presented by Professor John P. Britton in J. M. Steele & A. Imhausen (eds.), Under One Sky, Munster: UgaritVerlag, 2002, pp. 3435.) |
| Was Moses Really the Author of the Pentateuch? How should the Orthodox be? I would suggest, above all, not imposing grievous ties on oneself by confusing the stubbornness of Protestant fundamentalism with Patristic Tradition. For them, the authority of Scripture is based upon a literal interpretation of Revelation: God dictated these words to the great Prophet Moses, and therefore they are trustworthy. But for them, on the other hand, there is no such thing as Tradition. The average Orthodox reader of the Bible doesn’t think about questions such as the authorship or dating of individual books. The first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch of Moses? Of course, the Prophet Moses wrote it – after all, that’s what it’s called, and that’s what Scripture and Tradition teaches. And whoever doesn’t agree is an impious atheist. But then this Orthodox reader might come up against arguments from the other side. He either rejects them out of hand, starting directly from the conclusions without bothering with the arguments, or… he considers them and agrees with some of it. Does this then mean Scripture and Tradition are unreliable? Some draw this conclusion. Let’s stop and think about it. Tradition is a difficult and diverse thing; in it one can find all kinds of different statements (for instance, about a flat earth, the sun revolving around the earth, and the marriages of hyenas with morays), but only some of them are in fact of doctrinal significance. The question of the authorship of Biblical books clearly is not one of them. But what about the name the “Pentateuch of Moses”? Doesn’t it indicate an author? Not necessarily. Thus, the Psalter bears the name of King David, but David definitely didn’t write Psalm 136, “By the waters of Babylon,” simply because he died long before the Babylonian captivity. It’s unlikely that Jonah, Ruth, and Job themselves wrote the books that bear their names. And the Prophet Samuel certainly didn’t write the two books bearing his name in the Hebrew tradition (First and Second Kings in ours [i.e., in the Septuagint]) simply because he died in the middle of the first book. |
| It could be that for an average Orthodox person, weighed down by everyday errands and worries, such resources are not so obvious or readily available, and that they do not have access to proper interpretations of Church writers in the modern context. These would most directly be provided by the parish priest. Also, certain Church writings might seem to offer a lot of theory, but not much practical advice on how to meet existing challenges that parents face. Many younger parents belong to a generation that did not have the privilege to grow up in a Christian home, and they feel disconnected from the vast experience and traditions that such a life offers. These parents are now actively searching for a new set of values to impart to their children that would arguably be deeper than the superficial adherence to societal rules of proper conduct. Seeing that quite a few Orthodox texts and books are painfully disengaged from real life, contemporary Orthodox parents often turn to secular parenting books in search of answers to their child rearing dilemmas. However, while there are plenty of “real issues” addressed in them, few of these books even remotely reflect the values and goals of parenting the Orthodox would find relevant. So, what are these experts saying? It proves to be a tall order – 1) their advice to take charge of our children’s life, and 2) the enormous responsibility thrown at parents to be the omniscient, omnipotent enablers of their children’s happiness and success in this world. No mention, naturally, of giving our children over to God’s care and tending to their souls rather than worrying about their worldly success and material needs alone. After all, parents need a break, too, and relief from the pressure to break the code of perfect parenting. Ironically, oftentimes this pressure comes from the very people who advertise their intention to (see note below) Today’s parents are stressed out, overworked and anxious about doing the right thing by their children. This concern often inspires them to “overdo it” in their parenting efforts, resorting to what has been labeled as “helicopter parenting,” micro-managing their children’s existing activities and burdening them with an ever increasing list of new ones. |
| As the chronology after this Introduction indicates, the Orthodox-with the Jews, Muslims, and other traditional Christians-trace their beginnings back to the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then to Moses-if not before the Patriarchs to humankind’s prototypical parents, Adam and Eve. These stories are so well-known that they hardly bear repeating here. But it is worthwhile to point out that the Orthodox understand this “history” (not always history in the modern sense) as a chronicle of God’s revelations, not only to particular human beings, but to humankind in general. The revelations are infrequently, if ever, individual in the restrictive sense of the word, but are meant to guide all of humanity by ultimately forming a people (the People of God) that lives its community life in communion with the one self-revealing God. Further, for the Orthodox this revelation continued personally in Jesus Christ, the unique and preexistent Son of God and Lord, and personally as well in the revelation of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit and revelation are ongoing in the life of the Church-one God in three Persons. Indeed, the Orthodox faith described as the Church of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the life of the Holy Spirit is arguably more apropos than that of the Ecumenical Councils, since religious faith and experience are more meaningful and readily accessible to the average American than the difficult historical and theological questions of the conciliar period. Orthodox history, most simply put, is a retrospective view and present appreciation of the life of God’s Spirit embracing humanity. Probably the most striking historical witness of the Orthodox Church for modern Christians is its uninterrupted presence at the holy places described in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the Apostle Paul, or the Bible generally. Further, the Orthodox may also be found speaking the descendant language(s) in which the words of the Bible were originally spoken and written-appreciating these words from within their own languages rather than from without. When Western Christians make pilgrimage to the Holy Land or look at the Church’s roots, they invariably meet the Orthodox firmly and permanently entrenched on these foundations-whether in the Church of the Resurrection (Holy Sepulcher), on the Ascension Mount, or in the ancient churches of Thessalonika or Athens. This history is intrinsically connected with classical Western history from Rome to Charlemagne, on to the Crusades, Renaissance, Reformation, and up to the present. Hierarchy and Administration |
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