Part of a whole

In our culture (the one I was raised in; e.g. Midwest USA), we have this uncanny tendency to view the world in hyper-individualistic terms. When compared to our historical predecessors and numerous less-developed (if you could call that an accurate description) countries, our advanced technology and social structures have effectively allowed this worldview to thrive. We see it in advertising and marketing, we see it in the recent concern about the next generation losing basic social skills in favor of staring at their smartphones.

My purpose here is not to bag on technology or to complain that the Western mindset is all wrong. Instead, I want to paint a picture in your head that we are generally raised to see ourselves as the "center of the story", if you will. By way of contrast, we see many ancient cultures and some modern ones who have well-developed shame/honor systems in which the individuals see themselves as intrinsically part of a larger picture.

 

What I'm Getting At...

The reason that I wanted to get you to think in terms of how individualistic versus how communal our mindset as a people has become is because I want to make a statement that will either strike you as intrinsically correct or incorrect and I feel that whatever your worldview, in terms of seeing yourself as part of a larger whole or seeing yourself as the main character in your life-story, is going to be the deciding factor.

Your relationship with God is not a private thing

Let that one simmer for a minute....

On the one hand...

I could definitely see the argument that comes from the individualistic worldview: "Hey, wait a second, my life is my life and my prayers are private and the Bible says to not let your prayers be seen in a public place but to pray in private and do good works in anonymity. And furthermore, the Bible says that only God can judge me and so if I got God on my side, who can say what about my relationship with him? It's none of anyone's business".

Just then, I tried to come up with a couple of the most common arguments; here's why they're unfounded...

While it's true that we have private lives and that maintaining a healthy internal spiritual life is vital to the human experience, the Bible in no way promotes or supports the kind of individualism we have wedged into the Christian tradition. When it speaks of not letting your prayers be seen and of doing good works secretly, the Spirit-inspired authors were talking about our pride: don't let pride be the reason you pray passionately or do things for others. Addressing the last little argument above, the Bible says that Christians are to allow God to be the judge of those who wrong us instead of trying to exact vengeance ourselves. This, however, is not equivocal to saying "only God can judge me"; no, everyone can judge you - most people will - but it is specifically because everyone has the capacity to judge that the command to not judge is important to the Christian life. Don't judge, it's God's job - not "only God can judge me".

On the other hand...

Christians believe that the Bible is perfect for describing how humans are to live with God and each other. If we believe this, then the first bit of my argument above ("my life is my life...) is total smoke; it doesn't hold. This is because the type of community and life that Christians are to live is to be one where Christ is the center of the picture, the main character of the story and the head of our community. So, the individualistic worldview that we've received from our culture is to be completely forsaken in favor of the communal and Christocentric worldview of Jesus. This is why our relationships with God are not private: our lives are not private.

How does this work with maintaining an internal spiritual life?

I will attempt to reconcile these two important facets of the Christian life - private spiritual life and communal faith - by way of an analogy. Let's think of this in terms of a sports team. I train Crossfit in which all work out routines are timed or scored in some way. This naturally evolved into competitions in which there are some partner events, individual events and team events. In some competitions there are teams of four or five in which they compete against other teams to accomplish the exercises set before them. 

As a member of a competitive team, everything I do in training as an individual is going to affect the whole, so there is a large portion of my training regimen that must keep in mind that there is a bigger picture at stake here and more going on than what I do as an individual.  However, this needs to be balanced with the fact that I am an individual and have personal strengths and weaknesses to contend with and, in training, these are things to focus on not to the end of becoming a greater me, but to make the team a greater contender for victory.

So...

A Christian faces this kind of tension; we are to be mindful of the fact that we are bringing the Kingdom of God to earth and that everything we do affects this overall goal and big picture. We are part of a larger community: the Church throughout history and the world. We are, however, individuals who have personal baggage and spiritual lives that need cleaned up, improved and maintained. We should not, however, let ourselves ever be deceived into thinking that we can focus solely on one of these two modes of spiritual living. We are both a community and individuals. Hold this tension because our individual relationships with God are public, communal and not private; they are part of a whole.

peace,

C.M.

 

Eastern Orthodox Tradition

Hello all! Again, here is a short history-related post so as to expand your horizons, so to speak. This post is about Eastern Orthodoxy. For those of us in the west who have little to no experience with it, let this be a primer. I've included several sources so that you can find some other people who are more qualified than I to give you information about our Eastern Christian family.

 The Eastern Orthodox Tradition

While it may be easiest for American Christians to look back at history and reflect with the assumption in mind that events surrounding and following the Protestant Reformation were the bulk of what was relevant between the 1500’s and modern times, it must be remembered that the Church is much larger than many Western minds acknowledge. In the East – particularly Russia – there were many exciting things happening. Men like Alexis Khomyakov and St. Innocent of Alaska were leaving their mark on how the Eastern Orthodox Church understood Christian worship and community. The Church in the East was contributing to the larger Christian tradition which may have greater implications in the next stage of Christian development here in the 21^st century.

Evolutions in the Orthodox Tradition

            The contributions and figures from the Eastern Orthodox tradition which are examined here all come after the fall of Constantinople and focus on Russian Orthodoxy as this was the major source of Orthodox theology for most of the period leading up to modernity. The first man of note is St. Innocent of Alaska (1797-1879) who was commissioned by the Academy of Kazan to increase missionary presence there.[1] Specifically, this married priest was sent to the Aleut people and was so enthralled with their way of life that he strove to learn the language and translate the Bible into Unagan which was the primary Aleutian dialect. In 1838 he lost his wife and after taking the vows of a monk was made Bishop of a rather large area which included the Aleutian Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula and more. Eventually he became the head of the Moscow Synod in 1868.[2]

            The many achievements of St. Innocent, while impressive in themselves, must be seen as part of a larger movement towards a simple and grounded faith. This movement was largely catalyzed by the publication of a book entitled Philokalia, translated as “the love of beauty”. This text was essentially a compilation of Eastern mystical texts that helped bring ascetic life back into vivacity in the Orthodox tradition. In order to get a quick look at how this movement developed, one can merely observe the growth from 452 functioning Orthodox monasteries in 1812 to 1045 monasteries in 1914.[3] This movement was also heavily founded on the Hesychist tradition which, as defended by St. Gregory Palamas in the 14^th century, is founded on a mystical notion of returning to oneself with the understanding that the Spirit of God is indwelling in the person. This largely gave theological worth back to the carnal parts of a human and made practical ministry vital to Christian living and thus Orthodox Christianity.[4]

            Along those same lines, Eastern Orthodox theology became more clearly articulated in contrast to the rival Protestant and Catholic explanations. The uniqueness of Orthodoxy is in the primary understanding that ecclesial function should begin with the Eucharist – that is, worship – and the ascetic tradition. The former of these two foundational points included traditional liturgy and the latter contained the elevation of the lay-theologian.[5] Along with the lay-theologians who were responsible for many road-side chapels which were constructed in this period, there was also an influx in ascetic spiritual leaders known as Startsi which translates as “old man”. Rarely receiving a formal education or ordination, these confessor-counselor-wise men were theologically on par with Catholicism’s ordained theologians.[6] These spiritual leaders in combination with the Hesychist influence and missions work such as that accomplished by St. Innocent all gave Eastern Orthodoxy a large measure of substantiality and longevity in practical Christian living.

A Balanced Theology

            The second man to be mentioned  is Alexis Khomyakov (1804-1860) who, as a Slavophile under Tsar Nicholas I strove alongside his companion Ivan Kireyevsky to establish Eastern Orthodox as the middle ground between Protestant and Roman Catholic extremes.[7] Part of this effort was motivated by Nicholas’ views of Russian Orthodoxy as a defense against “westernizing”. Khomyakov’s basic thesis, then, was that Orthodoxy already held within its theology the freedom which many turned to Protestantism for as well as the unity in the church which Roman Catholicism was known for.[8] This both/and position essentially set the stage for later developments in ecumenical theology which was more than a cheap truce among traditions and more than a mere defining of lines which are not to be crossed.[9] Instead, the work of Khomyakov and company was to reread history in light of the many different perspectives of Christianity and to try and renew Orthodoxy as valuable to the rest of the Christian tradition.

Concluding Thoughts

            The Eastern Orthodox tradition is often overlooked by westerners and, in light of all that has been written here, it seems that this should not be so. The church today is in the middle of evolving into whatever it will be next and as we progress in a world that is incredibly secular, it may be advantageous to look to how the Russian Orthodox tradition maintained its distinctness in the midst of a changing world. With a commitment to traditional worship and personal piety, the Orthodox Church has largely succeeded in being a good representation of Christian community in the spiritual heritage of Christianity. The next generation of leaders in the 21^st century would do well to give this tradition its well-deserved attention for the sake of the future Church.

References

Ferguson, Everett, John D. Woodbridge, and Frank A. James. "The Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church." In Church History: The Rise and Growth of the Church in Its Cultural, Intellectual, and Political Context, 663-64.

González, Justo L. From the Protestant Reformation to the Twentieth Century. Nashville: Abingdon Pr., 1987.

Hart, David Bentley. The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith. London: Quercus, 2007.

Janz, Denis, Richard A. Horsley, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger, Daniel Ethan Bornstein, Peter Matheson, Amanda Porterfield, and Mary Farrell Bednarowski. "Orthodoxy Under Communism." In A People's History of Christianity, 132-36.

Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. One with God: Salvation as Deification and Justification. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004.

Meyendorff, John. St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1974.

Zizioulas, Jean, and Douglas H. Knight. Lectures in Christian Dogmatics. London: T & T Clark, 2008.

---

[1] Ferguson, Everett, John D. Woodbridge, and Frank A. James. "The Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church." In Church History: The Rise and Growth of the Church in Its Cultural, Intellectual, and Political Context, 663-64.

[2] Hart, David Bentley. The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith. London: Quercus, 2007. 219-220.

[3] Ferguson, Everett, John D. Woodbridge, and Frank A. James. "The Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church." In Church History: The Rise and Growth of the Church in Its Cultural, Intellectual, and Political Context, 663-64.

[4] Meyendorff, John. St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1974.106-108.

[5] Zizioulas, Jean, and Douglas H. Knight. Lectures in Christian Dogmatics. London: T & T Clark, 2008. 120-126.

[6] Janz, Denis, Richard A. Horsley, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger, Daniel Ethan Bornstein, Peter Matheson, Amanda Porterfield, and Mary Farrell Bednarowski. "Orthodoxy Under Communism." In A People's History of Christianity, 132-36.

[7] Ferguson, Everett, John D. Woodbridge, and Frank A. James. "The Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church." In Church History: The Rise and Growth of the Church in Its Cultural, Intellectual, and Political Context, 663-64.

[8] González, Justo L. From the Protestant Reformation to the Twentieth Century. Nashville: Abingdon Pr., 1987. 424-425.

[9] Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. One with God: Salvation as Deification and Justification. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004. 7-9.

Let There Be

There was a man named Nicodemus, a Jewish religious leader who was a Pharisee. After dark one evening, he came to speak with Jesus. "Rabbi," he said, "we all know that God has sent you to teach us. Your miraculous signs are evidence that God is with you." Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God...I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life."
          - John 3, NLT

This conversation is one of a few places in Scripture that give us the concept of salvation being a rebirth of sorts - a recreation. What Jesus is telling Nicodemus here is that our spirits must be made new again if we are to see God's Kingdom here on earth. The theme of God making his people new again, though, is a thread throughout the Christian cannon. In fact, salvation is best understood, I believe, in terms of the grander scheme of creation. Specifically, we are created "ex nihilo" or "out of nothing" and so to this "nothingness" we have the propensity to return without the sustenance or sustaining power of God. So you and I, right now, are being held together by God's will that we do so. This is why, at death, we would face eternal separation from God; that is, our ultimate return to our base "nothing" state. Incredibly, our Creator longs for us to be with him and so salvation is essentially accepting his will to keep us with him forever and totally forsake our "nothingness".

It's important to remember, however, that we are in process. You and I are not able to achieve this higher state on our own. This is one of the reasons for Christ's coming, that you and I can become what we were intended to become: God's perfect creation. So, when we find ourselves in darkness and reverting to nothing, remember the words that called us from that nothing.

This idea was rattling in my head the other day when I was listening to this song. It is a song about creation and it's opening line says "darkness hovering, grasping everything it seems...". It then goes on to describe primordial earth: void and chaotic. Through a series of calls from afar, the song masterfully builds to the revelation of God's command "let there be light".

Application:
 
In our lives, we periodically find ourselves in dark times. Life can tend to feel - spiritually, emotionally and sometimes physically - like that chaotic mess that was before creation. With Christ as our base for faith and his love as our motivator for new life, day in and day out, we can sing "let there be light" and see his love illuminate our lives once more.

This is a short blog and there could be much more said about the connection between the Genesis poem of creation and our daily martyrdom to our chaotic and dark falleness. Still, I hope that in these few lines, you remember to think of your mornings as a new birth - every morning - and when life gets a little "primordial", I hope that you remember to sing "let there be light".

peace,
C.M.

On St. Augustine in Brevity

Hello all! As of now, I am on a brief break from my Masters program (which I'll finish in December) and so I will be getting back to writing here more often (as opposed to writing for that). So, in order to initiate this period of my life, I want to start with a brief recount of the "Father of Western Christianity", Saint Augustine of Hippo. Also, I will post two links to a couple songs that were directly inspired by his writing and use his words verbatim.

The reason: I want to post something like this every once in a while because I think it is extremely important for the church to know about the people that formed it into its current state; however, I realize that not everyone will have the time to read a whole book about characters like Augustine (or Auggie to those who know him best ;) ). So, it is my hope that these sporadic and brief writings on these people of Christianity will help you in your Spiritual development.

                                                                             Augustine of Hippo

Of all of the founding fathers of the Christian tradition, few if any can lay claim to being as influential for the worlds of philosophy and theology as Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Often referred to as the Father of Western Christianity, Augustine imparted much of the verbiage of Christianity in the West as well as many of the distinctions that most modern Christians take for granted.

Aurelius Augustinus was born and died in the town of Hippo in North Africa in the region that is now known as Algeria.  His father was a devout pagan of Rome and his mother was a Christian of simple faith. At age 17, Augustine went to Carthage to study rhetoric. There he encountered world views other than Christianity and quickly fell into Manichaeanism, a philosophy that maintained that the forces of good and evil in the world were eternally at a stalemate. This philosophy was appealing to the young, pleasure-seeking Augustine who indeed enjoyed all the pleasures that were available to a young man at the time. The year 384 found Augustine headed to Carthage to teach in Rome and finally Milan where he encountered the writings of Plotinus and promptly converted to Neoplatonism, abandoning his Manichaeanism leanings. Only two years later he himself recorded the story of his Christian conversion.

While sitting in a friend’s garden, Augustine claims to have heard a small voice like that of a child repeatedly telling him to “pick it up and read”. Having picked up Saint Paul’s letters to the church, he opened up to Romans 13:13-14 which blatantly called Augustine from his life of fleshly self-gratification. Thus Augustine returned to the faith of his childhood, imparted to him by his mother, and went on to spend a 40 year pastoral career, quite literally, shaping Christianity into the religion that we know it to be today.

One of Augustine’s biggest contributions to our faith tradition was his fusion of Christianity with the philosophy of Plotinus and, by extension, Plato. This was possible because Christianity, unlike Buddhism and other eastern religions, has no strict philosophical basis, but instead is based on the events of history surrounding the Jewish people and the man, Jesus of Nazareth. His method was more or less to lay Christianity over Neoplatonism and wherever Neoplatonism’s logical results conflicted with Christianity, Augustine gave preference to the Christian teaching; his belief that divine revelation trumped human reason was the power house behind much of his ground-breaking philosophy.

Augustine left to the annals of history two of the most profound works of literature ever produced from Christendom: Confessions and The City of God. The latter was his magnum opus of how Christians ought to view their role in this world. Drawing on Plato’s realm of forms, Augustine puts forth that there is a City of God that is founded on absolute truths and idealism and, contrastingly, there is the City of Man that is a shadow of the former’s perfection; in this way, he outlines ideal Christian living. In Augustine’s Confessions, we are given the known world’s first autobiography in the modern sense. This work was even more notable for the multiple applications that can be drawn from it; that is, not only is it biographical, but also introspective and revelatory into how Christians (according to Augustine) ought to deal with their own depravity.

It is no exaggeration to say that “Western Christianity is Augustinian Christianity”; this, however, does not necessarily mean that the man was in any way infallible. Along with giving the academic world works that largely anticipated philosophical giants like Kant, Descartes, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, Augustine gave us more harmful doctrine like that of predestination that was used in the middle ages to justify the grotesque slaughter heretics and informed Marxism which played a significant role in Hitler’s persecution of the Jewish people.

All in all, Augustine was a man who pioneered not only new ground in philosophy but also in church orthodoxy and literature. Imperfect as a man and affected by his historical context, Augustine still stands above most as the father of modern and Western Christianity on a global scale. 

Here and Here are the two songs that I promised at the beginning. The first is by a band called Gungor and the second by a band called Disciple.

Peace,

C.M.

On Death and Identity

Why does death hurt if we believe in Jesus? I mean, if we're going to see all of our deceased loved ones again someday, what sadness is there? After all, don't we love to cry "Oh Death, where is your sting?!" on Easter? So why do we cry? What mourning is there to be done if a loved one has died?

I shall endeavor to answer this question here. Be forewarned, like everything else on this blog, these are my beliefs personally and you're welcome to disagree :)

What is Death?

I believe in a theory which is known as "soul sleep"; it's this idea that when you die, your soul takes a long nap until it can be reunited with your perfected body in the resurrection. I think this jives well with Scripture and simply makes sense (because I have little confidence in alternate realities and thus have a hard time placing "heaven" as an ontological place). I do think that while we are sleeping we are given the sweetest dreams in which God comes to us in fellowship and we are allowed to experience paradise at that point, but these are not to be final - that is saved for the resurrection.

So, if this is what is in store for my loved ones, then why would I cry? Hold that thought.

Who Am I?

I think that when we understand our identity it must be seen in terms of relationship. I think that part of the image of God that we bear is the necessity for relationship as the Father is in relationship to the Son and Spirit and creation as a whole and us in particular. This means that, in a sense, I am the sum of the relationships that I have - to my wife, children, parents, siblings, friends, acquaintances, etc. So, when I meet someone new, I immediately give them a measure of myself and am changed to a small degree on a metaphysical level. The longer and more intimate of a relationship that I have with this person (any person), the more that they affect who I am and I them.

Why does this matter? Hold that thought too.

Putting it together as a Christian

When I take these two ideas and put them together and ask why death hurts Christians emotionally (which can lead to physical pains, but we won't go there in this post), I am brought to the following conclusion:

The pain that we feel from losing a loved one is the pain of self-separation.

This is not to say that I, as an individual am personally disintegrated, but that a part of me has metaphysically left me and there is a hole of sorts in its stead. There is pain in this and there is sorrow, but it is not at the idea that I'll never see this person again, nor is it in any doubt about their relationship to God (which is none of my business really). Instead, it hurts because I am fundamentally a different person without that loved one in my life.

Other places that the theory holds

This idea also seems sensible in the face of divorce in which a relationship that was once so intimate is now torn apart. Children and ex-spouses alike feel the void and, though they may be happy with new companions, there is still a connection to the previous life. If both people are still living, there is still a part that impacts the others identity.

This theory also supports why sex outside of marriage is a bad idea; that is, when one shares the intimate connection that a healthy sexual relationship is suppose to contain, a deep part of themselves are connected. When one promiscuously sleeps around - or even just has sex with whomever they're dating at the time, even if they only date a different person every 5 years - it is spiritually damaging and what is divinely designed to be a permanent relationship gets worn out like a screw that is stripped from overuse. There can be healing when a permanent relationship is established, but this process is painful.

Finally, this theory holds when we see childhood friends for the first time in a long time. The rekindling of relationships that have been long set aside can be one of the most beautiful moments because that part of you that has been untapped for so long can finally be re-explored. Childhood friends and school mates are great to keep around, but sometimes its sweeter to re-acquaint them later in life as well.

Concluding Thoughts

I encourage my reader to take some time to think about their relationships and life experiences in light of this theory. If every person I meet literally shapes who I am on a metaphysical level, perhaps I ought to be more careful with my relationships in general. Maybe I should be kinder to strangers who may end up having a long bearing on my life and whom I impact with my life. Perhaps my testament to the good news which is the establishment of the Kingdom of God is found more within how I shape people's lives with my friendship and not in my ability to argue well. There are profound implications and it is good to chase them out. 

In regard to the topic at our outset: grief, it is natural and healthy

to feel pain at the loss of a loved one, but listen well to Scripture to hear Jesus whisper to you "why are you crying? They're only sleeping". Allow the Spirit of God which is in you to heal the hole that has been left by a relationship lost; Christ is enough.

Peace,

C.M.