Reflections in Christ

St. Ignatius of Antioch, martyred in Rome in about the year 107, wrote that along with the death of the Lord, the virginity of Mary and her giving birth were mysteries that were hidden from the ruler of this age, and were accomplished in the silence of God (To the Ephesians, 19.1). That is, their full significance were not immediately perceived by…

As I write these words, we are under effective lockdown because of the spread of the Corona Virus, often referred to as “Covid 19”.  In the current absence of a vaccine, the health departments of the various governments here in Canada have determined that the only way to slow the spread of the disease is by “social distancing”—i.e. by…

A dear friend of mine suggested that I might be interested in the Biblical exegesis of Mike Heiser (of whom I had never heard), so I looked up some of his works available on Amazon.  Amazon allows one to peruse the initial chapters of the books they offer for sale, so I was able to look at the first chapters of Heiser’s The Unseen Realm.  There I…

Anyone wandering about near a freezing cold pond one night near the city of Sebaste in the year 320 would have seen an astounding sight:  forty Roman soldiers, all members of the so-called “Thundering Legion”, were standing together naked in the icy waters throughout the night as they slowly froze to death.  They were guarded by other Roman…

In 1992, a spotlight was left too close to a curtain in Windsor Castle in England, and the heat from that spotlight caused the curtain to catch fire.  Before the fire was extinguished, much of the eleventh century castle built originally by William the Conqueror was in ruins, including St. George’s Hall and the royal Private Chapel.  Repairs,…

I suspect that every pastor has been asked this question at one time or another, and it usually comes from one of the more junior members of the congregation who has just lost his beloved cat or dog.  (The loss of goldfish seems not to provoke the same level of theological curiosity.)  It is important for pastors to realize that the child asking the…

In an issue of the Road to Emmaus journal I read a wonderful interview with Fr. Artemy Vladimirov, a priest in Moscow, in which he spoke at length about the sacrament of confession.  In it he spoke of the well-intentioned but ultimately false and unhelpful zeal of some confessors who felt “like the archangel with a burning sword guarding the…

For most English speaking people in our culture, the Lord’s Prayer ends with the words, “For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.  Amen.”  This is, however, an ecclesiastical and liturgical conclusion, not a part of the original Lord’s Prayer.  That does not mean, of course, that the ekkesia should omit the…

The next petition in the Lord’s Prayer is, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. These two conjoined sentences should be considered as a single petition in Hebrew poetic parallelism, like the earlier petition, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, because in the Lukan version we read only…

We come now in our series on the Lord’s Prayer to the petition, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”.  This rendering could perhaps use a little help.  It might be more accurately and literally rendered, “Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors”.  It is a brief enough petition, but within it…

It is easy looking back at St. Basil and his patristic compatriots from such a distance to forget that they too lived in times of struggle and uncertainty.  As we look back at the fourth century we can view it as the beginning of Byzantium, the start of a long stretch of glorious Christian ascendency, and we somehow assume that they knew at the…

We continue with our examination of the Lord’s Prayer, and come now to the petition, “Give us today our daily bread”.  One might be tempted to wonder what one could say about this petition by way of elaboration or explanation, since it seems pretty straightforward.  I suggest, however, three things.

First of all, that little word,…

We continue with our examination of the Lord’s Prayer, and come now to the petition “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”.  It seems clear that these words constitute a single petition expressed with Hebrew poetic parallelism, and not two separate petitions, since the Lukan version of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11:2…

We continue in this series with our examination of the Lord’s Prayer phrase by phrase, using Matthew’s version of the Prayer.  We turn now to the next petition: “Hallowed be Thy Name”.  To understand this petition we must first understand the Hebrew significance of a name.

In our culture, a name is simply a verbal tag, a number of syllables…

We continue this series examining the Lord’s Prayer phrase by phrase, using Matthew’s version of the Prayer rather than Luke’s.  We will begin by working from the archaic version of the text as commonly prayed in our liturgical tradition (e.g. “Our Father who art in heaven”, rather than “Our Father in heaven”) because this is the…

What would you do if you knew you were soon going to die? When a number of people aboard the Titanic knew that soon they would perish in the icy waters of the North Atlantic they could think of nothing better to do than to gather together and say the Lord’s Prayer. It was a wise choice. The band might play on (as we are famously told that they…

Much of the hymnography adorning our Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple causes the raising of eyebrows—talk about Mary being escorted into the Holy of Holies by Zechariah the high-priest and remaining there, being miraculously fed by an angel.  How is it that any female was allowed past the Court of Women, much less into the…

We Orthodox are fond of referring to the Church Fathers as authorities within the Church.  When faced with a new or controversial issue, an Evangelical Protestant will ask, “What does the Bible say?”  A classic Roman Catholic will ask, “What has Rome said?”  An Orthodox will respond, “What do the Fathers say?”  By this one can correctly…

Though Marcion has been dead for a long time, his legacy is still among us.  Marcion was a heretic in the second century who said that the Old Testament was un-Christian, and that the God of the Old Testament was not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that Christians should avoid the Old Testament since it was the work of an inferior deity. …

Who would have thought that dinosaurs would feature in Christian apologetics?  Like everyone of my vintage, I loved dinosaurs when I was a child, and later thrilled to Jurassic Park (yep; I’m that old).  But for all their reptilian roaring wonderfulness, dinosaurs never figured prominently in the world of my apologetic attempts to convert people…