| The Jerusalem Church consisted of Jews and proselytes from various nations. The Churches of Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Rome and all the others were composed of Jews but mainly of Gentiles. Each of these churches formed within itself an integral and indivisible whole. Each recognized as its Apostles the Apostles of Christ, who were all Jews. Each had a bishop installed by these Apostles without any racial discrimination: this is evident in the account of the founding of the first Churches of God. (…) The same system of establishing churches by locality prevails even after the Apostolic period, in the provincial or diocesan churches, which were marked out on the basis of the political organization then prevailing, or of other historical reasons. The congregation of the faithful of each of these churches consisted of Christians of every race and tongue. (…) Paradoxically, the Church of Greece, the Church of Russia, Serbia, Moldavia and so on, or less properly Russian Church, Greek Church etc., mean autocephalous or semi-independent churches within autonomous or semi-independent dominions, with fixed boundaries identical with those of the secular dominions, outside which they have no ecclesiastical jurisdiction. They were composed not on ethnic grounds, but because of a particular situation and do not consist entirely of one race or tongue. Nor has the Orthodox Church ever known racial churches of the same faith and independent of one another to coexist within the same parish, town or country. (…) If we examine those canons on which the Church’s government is constructed, we find nowhere in them any trace of racism. (…) Similarly, the canons of the local churches, when considering the formation, union or division of ecclesiastical groupings, put forward political reasons or ecclesiastical needs, never racial claims. (…) From all this, it is quite clear that racism finds no recognition in the government and sacred legislation of the Church. But the racial principle also undermines the sacred governmental system of the Church. (…) |
| For this reason, it identifies apophaticism with the ‘theology of negations or with the mysticism of affective contemplation (contemplatio) of the ‘absolute’. The West rejected Greek epistemology (ancient and patristic alike), its identification of being true with participation or communion, just as it rejected, too, the ontology of the Church, the distinction between essence and energies, the priority of the personal over the essence, the priority of freedom and otherness over the essential predetermination of the principle of existence. With this twofold rejection – of epistemology and ontology – there is betrayed not only an error of reasoning or defective understanding, but the ‘natural’ human opposition to freedom or the hazard of relationship, the need of natural (individual and not personal) men and women for assured certainties that can be privately grasped as definitive concepts. And if persistence in assurances focused on the individual is a ‘turn towards death’ (alienation of existential relatedness that constitutes and makes up the subject), 129 then we can characterize the theology that emerges from such a persistence as a theology of death, a theology of dead surrogates for life, a theology of a dead God or of the death of God. The empiricism of relationship is expressed in the Areopagitical writings with the definition of participation in the divine energies as the exclusive way to the knowledge of God. We speak of the ‘knowledge of God’ in general, since the divine energies,» to the extent that they reveal to us the otherness of the Hypostases, offer the possibility of a participation in knowledge of what God is universally. And this, because no personal hypostasis (whether divine or human) is a fragment or part of divine or human being, on the contrary, each person recapitulates and expresses the whole mode of being, complete divinity or humanity. Neither divinity nor humanity exist outside the existent hypostases, that is to say, outside the persons. |
| 6467 So also Holwerda, Spirit, 17–24; Hunter, John, 82. 6468 So also, e.g., Hunter, John, 83. 6469 Fenton, John, 93, cites Isa 55:6; cf. also Ezek 7:25–26 ; Hos 5:6 ; Amos 8:12; contrast Deut 4:29 ; Jer 29:13 ; Whitacre, John, 191, adds Prov 1:28–31 . 6470 Hunter, John, 83; Köstenberger, John, 137. 6471 Cf. Robinson, Trust, 88; idem, «Destination.» 6472 E.g., Isocrates Nic. 50, Or. 3.37; Paneg. 108, Or. 4; Helen 67–68, Or. 10; Plato Alc. 2, 141C; Theaet. 175A; Laws 9.870AB; Strabo Geog. 6.1.2; 13.1.1; 15.3.23; Plutarch Agesilaus 10.3; Timoleon 28.2; Eumenes 16.3; Bride 21, Mor. 141A; Dio Chrysostom Or. 1, On Kingship 1, §14; Or. 9, Isthmian Discourse, §12; Or. 12, Olympic Discourse, §§11, 27–28; Or. 31.20; Or. 32.35; Or. 36.43; Sextus Empiricus Eth. 1.15; Diogenes Laertius 6.1.2; Athenaeus Deipn. 11.461b; Tatian 1,21,29. 6473 E.g., Josephus War 5.17; Ant. 1.107; 15.136; 18.20; Ag. Ap. 1.201; 2.39; Philo Cherubim 91; Drunkenness 193; Abraham 267; Moses 2.20; Decalogue 153; Spec. Laws 2.18,20,44,165; 4.120; Good Person 94, 98; Contemp1. Life 21; Embassy 145,292. 6474 E.g., Bar 2:13 ; Tob 13:3; Pss. Sol 8:28; Josephus Ag. Ap. 1.33; Jas 1:1. John also applies the expression to the scattering of believers (10:12; 16:32; cf. Acts 8:1,4; 11:19; 1Pet l:l;perhaps Jas 1:1). 6475 Cf. Brown, John, 1:349. 6476 Talbert, John, 145 (following Lindars). Cf. the repetition some scholars find in the discourses of chs. 6, 14–16. 6477 E.g., Westcott, John, 123; Grigsby, «Thirsts.» 6478 The public part of the procession was in the court of women (Safrai, «Temple,» 866–67, 894–95; for women " s participation, Safrai, «Relations,» 198); processions were also central to pagan religious festivals (Grant, Gods, 53; Ferguson, Backgrounds, 151; SEG 11.923 in Sherk, Empire, 58, §32; Xenophon Eph. 5.11; Chariton 1.1.4–5; Dunand, Religion en Egypte, 96,103; Frankfurter, Religion in Egypt, 52–53; Bleeker, Festivals), including carrying sacred objects (Xenophon Eph. 1.2; Philostratus Vit. soph. 2.20.602). |
| To illustrate briefly what he means, I must begin with his own introductory statement in the above-mentioned book, that there are four things which men desire, as it were by nature without a master, without the help of any instruction, without industry or the art of living which is called virtue, and which is certainly learned: either pleasure, which is an agreeable stirring of the bodily sense; or repose, which excludes every bodily inconvenience; or both these, which Epicurus calls by the one name, pleasure; or the primary objects of nature, which comprehend the things already named and other things, either bodily, such as health, and safety, and integrity of the members, or spiritual, such as the greater and less mental gifts that are found in men. Now these four things – pleasure, repose, the two combined, and the primary objects of nature – exist in us in such sort that we must either desire virtue on their account, or them for the sake of virtue, or both for their own sake; and consequently there arise from this distinction twelve sects, for each is by this consideration tripled. I will illustrate this in one instance, and, having done so, it will not be difficult to understand the others. According, then, as bodily pleasure is subjected, preferred, or united to virtue, there are three sects. It is subjected to virtue when it is chosen as subservient to virtue. Thus it is a duty of virtue to live for one " s country, and for its sake to beget children, neither of which can be done without bodily pleasure. For there is pleasure in eating and drinking, pleasure also in sexual intercourse. But when it is preferred to virtue, it is desired for its own sake, and virtue is chosen only for its sake, and to effect nothing else than the attainment or preservation of bodily pleasure. And this, indeed, is to make life hideous; for where virtue is the slave of pleasure it no longer deserves the name of virtue. Yet even this disgraceful distortion has found some philosophers to patronize and defend it. |
| While continuing to promote and defend Scientology, which is a global religious persecutor, the US has done nothing about the cult’s persecution of Caroline and me, and has not even acknowledged our request for help. For the US to be compelled by its own law to promote and defend a “religious” organization internationally, the only condition the IRFA puts on the nature of that organization’s religious “practices” is that they are “peaceful.” (See 22 USC 6401(a)(5), 6402(13)(A)(i).) If Philip Morris, the tobacco corporation, being a commercial enterprise, determined that it is religious, and that its cigarettes are religious artifacts and smoking is a sacrament, the US would be obliged to defend and promote the Church of Philip Morris® around the world. The Church’s religious artifacts and religious exercise might harm or shorten the lives of its practitioners, but smoking is peaceful, and even people’s deaths from smoking or lung cancer are peaceful. In fact, death from smoking necessarily eliminates any possibility of the diers dying unpeaceful deaths, which for CPM is an excellent religious marketing concept. The Church of Philip Morris, following religiously in Scientology’s precedential legal footsteps, would make Fair Game against its critics a core religious belief and practice. As with Scientology, CPM’s false advertising for its products and its way to happiness would of course be a protected, tax exempt activity; as would be the Church’s lying, trickery and litigation, and even destroying people, as long as it was some form of peaceful destruction. CPM members and their attorneys naturally would Black PR people who criticized the Church and its poisons as religious bigots or anti-religious extremists. Scientology, however, unlike the Church of Philip Morris, is not peaceful, even in its own unalterable scripture, and is not engaged in peaceful activities, but is, by scripture, at war. Scientology and Scientologists, moreover, are not at war with an unfortunate, or harmful, or threatening condition in the world; for example, a war on evil, or on poverty, on illiteracy, or on litter. Scientology is at war with real, live, decent, productive people with real, live families, friends, careers, etc. Scientology’s front groups. which make a big deal of confronting generalized phenomena or conditions in society, the wogs’ world — Applied Scholastics for illiteracy; Narconon for drugs; Criminon for criminality; Citizens Commission on Human Rights for psychiatry; etc. – all exist to cloak Scientology’s and Scientologists’ real, and antisocial, war, which is on real persons, live human beings that the Scientology head says are to be warred on. All persons that Scientology and Scientologists war on are in the religio-racial class invented and identified in Scientology scripture as “Suppressive Persons” or “SPs.” |
| Second, the programs are dishonest . It is a regular practice for government civil servants employed in population control programs to lie to their prospective targets for quota-meeting about the consequences of the operations that will be performed upon them. For example, Third World peasants are frequently told by government population control personnel that sterilization operations are reversible, when in fact they are not. Third, the programs are coercive . As a regular practice, population control programs provide “incentives” and/or “disincentives” to compel “acceptors” into accepting their “assistance.” Among the “incentives” frequently employed is the provision or denial of cash or food aid to starving people or their children. Among the “disincentives” employed are personal harassment, dismissal from employment, destruction of homes, and denial of schooling, public housing, or medical assistance to the recalcitrant. Fourth, the programs are medically irresponsible and negligent . As a regular practice, the programs use defective, unproven, unsafe, experimental, or unapproved gear, including equipment whose use has been banned outright in the United States. They also employ large numbers of inadequately trained personnel to perform potentially life-endangering operations, or to maintain medical equipment in a supposedly sterile or otherwise safe condition. In consequence, millions of people subjected to the ministrations of such irresponsibly run population control operations have been killed. This is particularly true in Africa, where improper reuse of hypodermic needles without sterilization in population control clinics has contributed to the rapid spread of deadly infectious diseases, including AIDS. Fifth, the programs are cruel, callous, and abusive of human dignity and human rights . A frequent practice is the sterilization of women without their knowledge or consent, typically while they are weakened in the aftermath of childbirth. This is tantamount to government-organized rape. Forced abortions are also typical. These and other human rights abuses of the population control campaign have been widely documented, with subject populations victimized in Australia, Bangladesh, China, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Kosovo, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, the United States, Venezuela, and Vietnam. |
| It is this consensus which distinguishes Byzantine theology, taken as a whole, from the post-Augustinian and Scholastic West, and makes possible the attempt, which we undertake in the second part of our study, at a systematic presentation of Byzantine Christian thought. 2. A Living Tradition This presentation is rendered difficult, however, by the very character of Byzantine church life, as it is reflected in the theological literature. In the Byzantine period, as in the patristic, neither the councils nor the theologians show particular interest in positive theological systems. With a few exceptions, such as the Chalcedonian definition, the conciliar statements themselves assume a negative form; they condemn distortions of the Christian Truth, rather than elaborate its positive contentwhich is taken for granted as the living Tradition and as a wholesome Truth standing beyond and above doctrinal formulae. By far the greatest part of the theological literature is either exegetical or polemical, and in both cases the Christian faith is assumed as a given reality, upon which one comments, or which one defends, but which one does not try to formulate exhaustively. Even John of Damascus, sometimes referred to as the «Aquinas of the East» because he composed a systematic Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (De fide orthodoxa), produced only a short textbook, not a theological system; if his thought lacks anything, it is precisely that original philosophic creativity which a new system would presuppose. The lack of concern for systematization, however, does not mean a lack of interest in the true content of the faith or an inability to produce exact theological definitions. On the contrary. No civilization has ever lived through more discussions on the adequacy, or inadequacy, of words reflecting religious truths. The homoousion as distinct from the homoiousion, «of two natures» or «in two natures»; two wills or one will; latreia of icons or proskynesis of images; the created or uncreated character of the divine «energies»; procession «from the Son» or " " through the Son " these were issues debated by Byzantine Christians for centuries. |
| Whether the deacon serves only a liturgical function, or as a full- or part-time minister within a diocese or parish, is largely a matter of need and training. Other types of deacon are protodeacon and archdeacon, both of which are classically supervisory roles over other deacons, but in practice indicate a bishop’s deacon or an honorary title. These offices are similar to those of archpriest, protopresbyter, archbishop, etc., wherein the classical definition has to do with leadership over others of the same rank, but practically speaking nowadays the title is frequently an honorific. Primary reasons for titles as honorifics stem from (1) the practice of the Russian Church, wherein Peter the Great made ecclesiastical rankings correspond exactly to civil service seniority rankings (disregarding their functional, ecclesial aspect) and (2) the desire to give titular honors. Although most agree that this “system of awards” needs to be reformed, the discipline to do so is not overabundant. Other “lower orders” of clergy include subdeacons and readers. Subdeacons are altar servers who are trained to assist at the pontifical (bishop’s) services. Readers or cantors chant and read the epistle and people’s parts of the services. All deacons, subdeacons, and readers are technically ranked among the laity, while bishops and priests are considered clergy. Before listing the ranks of monastic clergy, two items should be pointed out. First, unlike the Roman Catholic Church (after the Cluny Reform), the parochial clergy of the Orthodox Church are not usually celibate or monastic, but are married or “white” clergy. Orthodox bishops (after the Seventh Ecumenical Council) must be elected from among the monastic or “black” clergy. The matter of marriage or celibacy of clergy is thus disciplinary and not doctrinal. Second, monastic men and women who are not ordained are reckoned among the laity and not among the clergy. Ordained monastics have special titles: a hierodeacon is a monk-deacon; a hieromonk is a monk-priest; a hegumen is an abbot of a smaller religious community; while an archimandrite is abbot of a larger monastery. |
| In this context one can already see that any attempt to induce or hasten death for the primary purpose of ending pain and suffering (as distinct from the possible requirements of war or capital punishment) by any outside or artificial means, such as physician-assisted suicide, is not grounded in the traditional and ancient Christian way of seeing meaning and value in life’s afflictions. In fact, suicide (whether physician-assisted or not) is considered a symptom of despair—a deadly and soul-destroying sin—for such an act incorrectly assumes that joy or happiness are primarily the absence of suffering, and stands in stark contrast to St. Paul’s statement that we can be sorrowful, yet always rejoicing (2 Cor. 6: 10) and all who will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer (2 Tim. 3:12). However, in our secular culture the idea of joy or contentment in the midst of sorrow and affliction is becoming increasingly politically incorrect. The traditional Christian sees that if the dying process were without pain and discomfort, very few would opt for suicide or physician-assisted suicide. It is the avoidance of pain which has become the imperative today, even though a good deal of life and living is naturally accompanied by afflictions and suffering of all kinds, and cannot be avoided—and not just bodily pain, but emotional, mental, and spiritual, as well. Although the word euthanasia means “good death,” traditional Christians see this as a misnomer, for they have always defined death—when it is sought as an end in itself—as evil. According to Orthodox theology, man was originally created in order to live forever, and death, which came into the world by sin, is a violation of God's plan for man. Therefore, although one need not—as we see in the lives of the saints below—artificially attempt to extend the dying process, we may not ourselves hasten the cessation of life, either. “This holds equally true whether the decision for death is made by the person concerned or by his caregivers.” In the case of those confessors who actually sought martyrdom, their death, like that of the soldier fighting to stop the spread of Nazism or Communism, is not an end in itself, but in order to achieve a greater good—i.e., the spread of the faith, the end of tyranny, etc. The voluntary martyr, therefore, far from opening even a tentative door to physician-assisted suicide (even as the lesser of two evils, as some suggest it may actually be), presents us with someone quite different from the person who seeks death only in order to stop his own personal physical and mental suffering, and who may thereby be rejecting the providence of God in his life, a providence that encompasses many things, including purification and refinement of soul which, experience shows, comes to those who accept the suffering of their final illness. |
| Second, certainly there are times when a married couple may abstain for the sake of prayer, but as the scripture (and Elder Thaddeus) says, it must be by mutual agreement. Mutual agreement does not mean that one person makes the other feel guilty or dirty or sinful because he or she doesn’t want to abstain as much as the other—especially for prayer. Here, the weaker brother law applies. Just as monks would eat whatever is served them without asking questions so as not to offend their host, so a married person must serve his or her spouse. I am speaking here in regard to abstinence for prayer, not in terms of each person’s physical and psychological rhythms and their “natural” or regular patterns or “needs” which will change throughout their lifetime and according to a myriad of circumstances. These have to be worked out in love, self sacrifice and mutual care between the couple. Which brings me to the third and perhaps most important issue. There are many different pathways to holiness. Further, there are many different life situations people find themselves in. How any abstinence or ascetical practice might be applied in any given situation can vary greatly. In some marriages, where the relationship is strong and the sexual life is regular and mutually satisfying (forgive me for being explicit, but the topic requires it), then periods of abstinence by mutual agreement are not harmful (if indeed they are for prayer, and not merely because it is lent. There is a huge difference here. To fast without praying is very close to hypocrisy). However, many couples struggle in their relationship so that just maintaining regularity and affection is itself an ascetical discipline. Consider the example of a person who struggles with anorexia or bulimia or some similar eating disorder. Every day for this person is an ascetical struggle with food. Just to eat a normal healthy diet with regular meals and regular portions is already a huge ascetical struggle. Similarly, each married couple has to find what works for them, what actually promotes prayer and peace in their relationship, what actually helps them draw near to God. |
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