Reflections in Christ

The earliest Church, from the days of the apostles and into the first centuries, had an abundant share of guts and what everyone else regarded as perversity.  Its claims were so outrageous that it was hard for the average Jew or Greek or Roman to take them seriously. 

Those claims began immediately after the crucifixion of Jesus.  A small group…

I cannot be the only one who has had the experience of visiting a non-Orthodox church service and finding it stunningly empty and plain.  After long familiarity with Orthodox worship with its icons, incense, candles, vestments, Gospel books, and crosses, attending such services produces a kind of sensory deprivation, rather like sensory overload in…

In my previous piece, “Why I Am a Christian (Part 1)” I examined the question of why one should believe in the physical Resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  I looked at the essential historical reliability of the Gospels portraits of Jesus and His claims to be God.  I concluded that given the number and audacity of those claims, there were only…

Many years ago, when I was tucking my eldest daughter into bed, she asked me a question:  “Dad, why do we believe in the Resurrection?”  I have always taught both my daughters to be strong and to think for themselves, and so I was happy to hear the question, and I answered it as best as I could, giving the historical evidence.  At the end of it…

In 1956 an American game show debuted called “To Tell the Truth”.  Each round of the game introduced three people all claiming to be the same person, and a team of panelists would ask them questions.  Those pretending to be the real (usually famous) person would make up answers, while the real person would answer truthfully.  The inquiring…

Some heresies never seem to die, but have a disconcerting tendency to pop up in every generation, rather like the emerging heads of the whack-a-mole in the children’s game one sees in Chuck E. Cheese:  whack them down as hard and often as you like, but they will pop up again someplace else.

The Gnostic view of matter is like that.  Drawing upon…

Like many Orthodox clergy, I have lost track of the number of times my Protestant brethren have objected to the priestly title (in my case, “Father Lawrence”), citing the Bible which commands that they “call no man ‘Father’”.  They are, of course, thinking of our Lord’s words in Matthew 23:9.  If I am feeling puckish and mischievous, I…

In the late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s classic The Orthodox Church, he describes the Church as “a continued Pentecost”.  This is true, but it is important not to misunderstand his meaning.

It is possible to understand the description of the Church as “a continued Pentecost” as meaning that the Church is an earthly organization founded…

One of the first things that clergy do after entering the church on Sunday morning for Divine Liturgy is to put on special clothes called “vestments”.  They are highly stylized and every priest wears the same things:  first the priest puts on a long vestment called a stichar or sticharion, usually white in colour, which falls down to his ankles;…

The ancient world was built on three fundamental realities—foundations which persist to this day—and Christ overturned all of them. No wonder His Church was considered both radical and dangerous.

The first reality was the foundation of family.  Loyalty to one’s family—and by extension to one’s clan, tribe, or nation—was paramount, and…

In my last piece I discussed the Old Testament view of the atonement.  Here I would examine the New Testament understanding of the atonement. 

As with the Old Testament, there is in the New Testament no clear and detailed elaboration of how the atonement “works”, which of course accounts for the current debate about it.  But all Christians…

It is perhaps significant that there is no obvious and complete explanation of atonement and how it functioned in the Bible.  My guess is that this was because it was too obvious to the ancients to require stating.  People just knew instinctively that they were in need of help and closer union with the gods/ God and that offering sacrifice was the…

Recently I was asked a very important and perceptive question by a very smart catechumen, a man converting from Roman Catholicism.  He knew that at the Council of Nicea (325 A. D.) the assembled bishops voted for the homoousios teaching of Christ’s full divinity by an overwhelming majority of something like 318 to 2.  He also knew that at the…

This question is often asked by concerned Church people, especially those in the “mainline” churches here in Canada such as the United Church, the Anglican Church, and the Roman Catholic Church.  Church statisticians, usually with long faces and bass voices, solemnly announce that Christianity is on the decline and has been for decades.  One…

Having looked at the development of angelology in the Scriptures and the figure of the Angel of the Lord, we conclude this series by talking about the role of angels in the life of the Christian.  Their importance can be gauged by their presence in our liturgical tradition.

First, a word of cultural clarification:  the angels in the Orthodox…

In our last post we looked at the long process whereby angelology developed in the Bible.  Now we will look at one particular aspect of this:  the mal’ak Yahweh, “Yahweh’s messenger”, usually translated “the Angel of the Lord”.

We have seen that the Hebrew word mal’ak could mean several things.  In Genesis 32:3 it meant the human…

In order to fully understand angels in the Bible it helps to embrace a bit of temporary amnesia and forget most of what we know about angels.  That is because angelology has undergone a long development from its ancient Near Eastern pre-history before the days of the Bible to its final formulation at the hands of Saint John of Damascus (d. ca. 749…

I begin with a quote from an article that is almost 60 years old, but which has lost none of its timeliness:  “Since the Byzantine era, Orthodoxy was always brought to and accepted by whole nations.  The only familiar pattern of the past, therefore, is not the creation of mere local churches, but a total integration and incarnation of Orthodoxy in…

Second Temple Judaism was a many-splendoured thing.  That is, it included many different elements—so many elements in fact that some people talk not just of Judaism, but Judaisms (in the plural). While the use of the plural might be a bit of a stretch, there is no denying that Second Temple Judaism was more diverse than the Rabbinic Judaism you…

Each year one of my favourite Christmas songs is an old novelty song called Snoopy’s Christmas, released in 1967 by the Royal Guardsmen as a follow-up to their previous hit Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.  The song was inspired by actual events. During the First World War troops on either side of the front line crossed over into No Man’s Land on…