Can you recommend any resources for defending the church as an institution?

Rather than looking at the Church as an institution (a corporation with officers and bylaws and uniforms and all), from the inside we look at it this way:

The apostles founded local communities all around the Mediterranean and the Middle East: Greece, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Asia Minor, etc. Each of those communities, locally, was a church. But St Paul speaks of all of them, together with the Jerusalem community as The Church. To Paul there’s an Us (the Church) and there’s everybody else. All those 1st-century communities, founded by the apostles and by those who followed them, remain united in the same faith and practice, and consider themselves one with the apostolic band at Jerusalem.

Over the next couple of generations, the Church expands from end to end of the civilized world. Heresies and cults arise: Montanists, Gnnostics, Ebionites, and lots more. Modern scholars debate the validity of those competing christianities; and they speak of the Jerusalem community and those that are in union with them as “proto-orthodox.” We recognize the same division, and call that “proto-orthodox” community-of-communities The Church.

By the 4th century, when Christianity is legalized, there’s a rift down the center of that Church: Arians deny the divinity of Christ. The emperor orders the Church’s bishops to sit down and determine what his Church believes. By the time Athanasius is done presenting his case, the vocabulary is agreed on and the bishops sign onto the resulting Creed. Some bishops (e.g. Basil the Great and Eusebius of Caesarea, IIRC) arrived as semi-Arians, that is they liked to call Christ homoiousious, of “similar nature” to the Father, but after hearing from the others present, they agreed to adopt the majority’s vocabulary and they agreed to the Creed. Those bishops who refused to attend the council, or those who refused to submit to its Creed and canons, were anathematized as heretics: not part of the Church.

Now there were Christians outside the Church. They were worshippers of Jesus, in their way, but not part of the Church.

That paradigm worked until just the last couple of centuries: People were Orthodox Christians, or heretics, or unbelievers. But nowadays, the Church finds itself coexisting with millions of Christians who do not define their faith by how they differ from the Church – most of them have never heard that there is a community-of-communities organically identical to the apostolic band at Jerusalem. Most of them are not heretics in that they have never chosento reject the Church’s teaching; they’re trying to be faithful to what they received. And many of them, who believe there is no identifiable, visible community called The Church, think of a church as an organization that people set up and trademark a name and run as an institution.

That’s why OrthoFolks are so hung up on historical rootedness: We can disagree about whether the Church is still faithful to the apostolic teaching or has fallen into false belief – but what’s not in dispute is the fact that the communities the Apostles founded never went away: Berea, Thessaloniki, Alexandria, Athens… those communities still exist, they still are united in faith, they correct one another when one gets out of line – and they call themselves Orthodox.

To answer a question with a question or several: On what basis do Evangelicals exclude Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons from the invisible Church? If I still love Jesus but I become unconvinced of, say, the virgin birth, the Trinity, or Christ’s divinity, do I instantly lose my membership in the invisible Church?

Do I have to measure up to some minimum, nonnegotiable degree of doctrinal orthodoxy to be a member of the Church? Why? And exactly what minimum beliefs? And on what purely scriptural basis do we proclaim those to be minimums which exclude you from the invisible Church? Can these questions be answered without having to make up an answer?

I really can’t see any point in positing an invisible, intangible thing called “Church” without the ability to definitively say who is in it, what puts you outside it, what it must and must not believe, how you join or leave it, and precisely how it is organically connected to the communities the Apostles founded.

Looking at year-over-year patterns, teen consumption on TV decreased by 45 minutes in Q4, dropped by 98 minutes in Q3, by 47 minutes in Q2, and by 127 minutes in Q1. Other than the fact that viewership dropped each quarter, there aren’t many linear trends to take away from that. Perhaps more significant is when the major drops in viewership occurred. Q1 and Q3 were the heaviest TV viewing periods for teens (coinciding somewhat with TV seasons), but those showed the biggest consumption declines….

In Q4, 12-17-year-olds watched roughly 21 and a half hours of TV per week, the lowest amount of any age group. Interestingly, that not only was about 45 minutes less than Q4 2011, it was about 1 hour less than the previous quarter…

You should click through and read his whole piece, The Kids Are All Russell Kirk.

But what really horrifies me is that number, 21 hours a week. That’s three hours a day. Every day.

I didn’t get rid of my TV for any philosophical or moralistic reason;  nearly twenty years ago I needed a downpayment for a car and liquidated all my toys, including my TV set. I got used to life without it. Then over the last few years I started watching television programs on Hulu or iTUnes — one program at a time, after intentionally making time to be awake, at home, with 43 uninterrupted minutes to watch my show. I love me some Doctor Who and it’s worth an hour a week to indulge.

But three hours! A day!  These are teens, who already spend six to eight hours a day in school. Who, theoretically, have friends and sports and clubs and maybe even homework, which they have to schedule around their TV viewing.

Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re just sitting there being programmed for about one fifth of their waking hours by nonstop cultural brainwashing and product promotion, to the exclusion of any human – or humanizing – interaction. 

Oh, and it’s not just a teen thing. Notice the report says:

In Q4, 12-17-year-olds watched roughly 21 and a half hours of TV per week, the lowest amount of any age group.

Well, that’s discouraging.

The fact that teens’ weekly television viewing hours are decreasing is good news, I guess. Interestingly, the reduction in TV viewing hours is not directly offset by an increase in Internet streaming video consumption.  The demographics and the difference in how people consume Internet streaming video are the socially interesting part of the report, which no doubt keeps traditional TV ad agencies up at night worrying. 

Still, the idea of most Americans coming home from work only to plug in and download corporate mind programming for at least three hours every day is just dystopian, and leaves me heavy-hearted.

This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.

More on the research: Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research at the Harvard Business Review.

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(via Used Wigs)

Did the Father pour out his wrath on the Son in order to reconcile us to himself? That’s pretty common thinking among American Christians of the Evangelical persuasion, but take a step back from it and look at it from a distance; it suddenly seems to be a grotesque image, and shows a disposition that, were we to see it in some human being, we would call “disturbed.”

Keep reading…

Virilio worked, after World War II, as a stained-glass artist along with Matisse and Braque; in the 60s, with partner Claude Parent, his concept of oblique architecture revolutionized the field; and in the 70s, he came to know the then-bosses of French theory: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Virilio’s book Speed and Politics, published in 1977, marked the birth of his concept of dromology, or the logic of speed. He’s been the publisher of Georges Perec and Jean Baudrillard, he’s friends with Chris Marker and Peter Sloterdijk… and now he’s friends with us.

Virilio’s observations on our society’s worship of progress are worth reading. Read on…

In a theological perspective it is evident that the content of [extreme right wing Christianity] contradicts the message of the Jewish-Christian tradition. The God of the prophets did not preach the nation-state, but community between strangers and natives. The apostle Paul did not base the justification of sinners on the Protestant work ethic, but on grace, which appears for young and old, for diligent and for lazy people! And Jesus did not make the family the central value of human life, but the solidarity of those deprived of their rights. The most important norms of the Moral Majority are not contained in Christian faith, as we can see from the many critical remarks against the family that appear in the gospels. It is characteristic of Christofascism that it cuts off all the roots that Christianity has in the Old Testament, in the Jewish Bible. No word about justice, no mention of the poor, whom God comes to aid, very little about guilt and suffering. No hope for the messianic reign. Hope is completely individualized and reduced to personal success. Jesus, cut loose from the Old Testament, becomes a sentimental figure. The empty repetition of his name works like a drug: it changes nothing and nobody. Therefore, since not everybody can be successful, beautiful, male, and rich, there have to be hate objects who can take the disappointment on themselves. Jesus, who suffered hunger and poverty, who practiced solidarity with the oppressed, has nothing to do with this religion.

Suffer Criticism as Profitable for Your Salvation

If we stop rejecting the criticism of others, be it justified or unjustified criticism, and see such criticism as profitable for our salvation, we will have gained a great spiritual treasure. When we gain the ability to see our own sinfulness, we see that even the good deeds we do is saturated with sin. When we have gained the humility that comes from embracing the criticism of others, we will see that we are unable to heal ourselves, but are entirely dependent upon God as our only source of healing.

When we take notice of our own sinfulness, we will stop judging others, seeing in them the same pitiful state, and realize they are our kinfolk, and we are all journeying together, towards God. They can no longer hurt or offend us with their criticism, for we pity them, just as we pity ourselves for our own sinfulness, and we see them as our friends in this common struggle for sanctification and holiness.

The famous Russian abbot of the 50′s and 60′s, Father Nikon, was said to have told a spiritual child that once he sees his own sin, he will stop exalting some and belittle others, seeing everyone as his brother or sister. He will begin to love everyone as his co-struggler.

Abbot Tryphon’s blog The Morning Offering is consistently encouraging, personal, and spiritually profitable. To receive his daily messages, add his blog to your RSS feed or “like” his Facebook page.

How to deal with allergies.

This week we celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation of Christ. Speaking of Christ’s incarnation in the Virgin, the second-century Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons takes up St Paul’s image of Adam and Christ, the first and Last Man, and meditates on the roles of Eve and Mary the Theotokos:

Mary transmitted to Christ the entire human reality of Adam, so that he could become the new Adam, the Son of man, the summary of all men from the first… Because it was necessary that Adam should be recapitulated in Christ, so that what was mortal might be engulfed by immortality; it was necessary also for Eve to be recapitulated in Mary, so that a Virgin, by becoming the advocate of a virgin, might cancel a virgin’s disobedience by a Virgin’s obedience.”
— cf. Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching §32-33

In the same way that Eve was married to Adam and yet was still a virgin — for they were both naked in Paradise but were not ashamed (Gn 2: 25) because they had been created just recently and had no notion of procreation: they first had to grow, and only afterward to multiply (Gn 1:28) — in the same way then that Eve, by disobeying, became the cause of death for herself and for all of humankind, likewise Mary, having for husband a man who had been purposed for her in advance and yet was still a Virgin, became, by her obedience, the cause of the Cause of salvation (cf. Heb 5:9) for herself and for all of humankind.

This is why the Law gives the woman who is betrothed to a man, even though she is still a virgin, the name of ‘spouse’ of the man to whom she is betrothed (Dt 22:23-24), signifying the reversal from Mary to Eve.

For what has been tied cannot be untied, unless one retraces the path of the string inside the knots.”
— Against Heresies III,22,4

The Orthodox view of sin is as an infection that pervades Creation and causes suffering for all (rather than bad deeds that demand punishment). It’s a new idea and hard to grasp, for converts. But one of its implications has to do with the suffering of the innocent; there is suffering because you and I sin, and contribute to the dis-ease of this life, and empower the evil one who hates humanity. The question of “why does God permit suffering” gets turned around. God became man to put an end to sin, but we keep returning to it voluntarily. Of course the evil one is going to go after the innocent in particular, because added to that suffering is the pain onlookers feel. Why do the innocent suffer? Because I gossip and eat too much.

“Why does the dog bark at us? It barks, because it is telling us, ‘On account of your sins, I also suffer illness and die.’”
— Elder Joseph the Cave-dweller (†1959):

The love that exists between a man and a woman is an important theme in many books of Scripture. The Book of Genesis, in particular, tells us of holy and pious couples, such as Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel. A special blessing, bestowed on these couples by the Lord, was made manifest in the multiplication of their descendants. Love is praised in the Song of Songs, a book which, in spite of all allegorical and mystical interpretations in patristic tradition, does not lose its literal meaning.

The very attitude of God to the people of Israel is compared in the Old Testament with that of a husband to his wife. This imagery is developed to such an extent that unfaithfulness to God and idolatry are paralleled with adultery and prostitution. When St Paul speaks about marital love as the reflection of the love which exists between Christ and the Church (cf. Eph.5:20-33), he develops the same imagery.

The mystery of marriage was established by God in Paradise. Having created Adam and Eve, God said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen.1:28). This multiplication of the human race was to be achieved through marriage: ‘Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh’ (Gen.2:24). Marital union is therefore not a consequence of the Fall but something inherent to the primordial nature of human beings. The mystery of marriage was further blessed by the Incarnate Lord when He changed water into wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. ‘We state’, St Cyril of Alexandria writes, ‘that He (Christ) blessed marriage in accordance with the economy (oikonomia) by which He became man and went… to the wedding in Cana of Galilee’.

There are two misunderstandings about marriage which should be rejected in Orthodox dogmatic theology. One is that marriage exists for the sole purpose of procreation. What, then, is the meaning of marriage for those couples who have no children? Are they advised to divorce and remarry? Even in the case of those who have children: are they actually supposed to have relations once a year for the sole purpose of ‘procreation’? This has never been a teaching of the Church. On the contrary, according to St John Chrysostom, among the two reasons for which marriage was instituted, namely ‘to bring man to be content with one woman and to have children’, it is the first reason which is the most important: ‘as for procreation, it is not required absolutely by marriage…’ In fact, in Orthodox understanding, the goal of marriage is that man and woman should become one, in the image of the Holy Trinity, Whose three Persons are essentially united in love. To quote St John Chrysostom again, ‘when husband and wife are united in marriage, they are no longer seen as something earthly, but as the image of God Himself’. The mutual love of the two partners in marriage becomes life-giving and creative when a child is born as its fruit. Every human being is therefore to be a fruit of love, and everyone’s birth is a result of love between his parents.

Another misunderstanding about marriage is that it should be regarded as a ‘concession’ to human ‘infirmity’: it is better to be married than to commit adultery (this understanding is based on a wrong interpretation of 1 Cor.7:2-9). Some early Christian sectarian movements (such as Montanism and Manicheanism) held the view that sexuality in general is something that is unclean and evil, while virginity is the only proper state for Christians. The Orthodox tradition opposed this distortion of Christian asceticism and morality very strongly.

In the Orthodox Church, there is no understanding of sexual union as something unclean or unholy. This becomes clear when one reads the following prayers from the Orthodox rite of Marriage: ‘Bless their marriage, and vouchsafe unto these Thy servants… chastity, mutual love in the bond of peace… Preserve their bed unassailed… Cause their marriage to be honorable. Preserve their bed blameless. Mercifully grant that they may live together in purity…’ Sexual life is therefore considered compatible with ‘purity’ and ‘chastity’, the latter being, of course, not an abstinence from intercourse but rather a sexual life that is liberated from what became its characteristic after the fall of Adam. As Paul Evdokimov says, ‘in harmonious unions… sexuality undergoes a progressive spiritualization in order to reach conjugal chastity’. The mutual love of man and woman in marriage becomes less and less dependent on sexual life and develops into a deep unity and union which integrates the whole of the human person: the two must become not only ‘one flesh’, but also one soul and one spirit. In Christian marriage, it is not selfish ‘pleasure’ or search for ‘fun’ which is the main driving force: it is rather a quest for mutual sacrifice, for readiness to take the partner’s cross as one’s own, to share one’s whole life with one’s partner. The ultimate goal of marriage is the same as that of every other sacrament, deification of the human nature and union with Christ. This becomes possible only when marriage itself is transfigured and deified.

In marriage, the human person is transfigured; he overcomes his loneliness and egocentricism; his personality is completed and perfected. In this light Fr Alexander Elchaninov, a notable contemporary Orthodox priest and theologian, describes marriage in terms of ‘initiation’ and ‘mystery’, in which ‘a full transformation of the human person’ takes place, ‘the enlargement of his personality, new eyes, new perception of life, birth into the world, by means of it, in new fullness’. In the marital union of two individuals there is both the completion of their personalities and the appearance of the fruit of their love, a child, who makes their dyad into a triad: ‘…An integral knowledge of another person is possible in marriage, a miracle of sensation, intimacy, of the vision of another person… Before marriage, the human person glides above life, seeing it from outside. Only in marriage is he fully immersed into it, and enters it through another person. This enjoyment of true knowledge and true life gives us that feeling of complete fulness and satisfaction which renders us richer and wiser. And this fulness is even deepened when out of the two of us, united and reconciled, a third appears, our child’.

Christ is the One Who is present at every Christian marriage and Who conducts the marriage ceremony in the Church: the priest’s role is not even to represent, but rather to present Christ and to reveal His presence, as it is also in other sacraments. The story of the wedding in Cana of Galilee is read at the Christian wedding ceremony in order to show that marriage is the miracle of the transformation of water into wine, that is, of daily routine into an unceasing and everyday feast, a perpetual celebration of the love of one person for the other.

Originally at: http://en.hilarion.orthodoxia.org/5_1#MARRIAGE