Reflections in Christ

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…

The first knock-down drag-out theological scrap I ever had was in high school and it was over the doctrine of Eternal Security.  I was not keen to have the scrap because the person I was contending with was a spectacularly pretty girl to whom I was greatly attracted, but I knew that truth trumped hormones.  Not by much, mind you, but enough for me…

The Biblical Song of Solomon (also called the Song of Songs) has always been read by Christians on two different levels—that is, it has been read on an historical level and on an allegorical one.  This is how Christians read the entirety of the Old Testament.  Take for example the story of the passage through the Red Sea.  Christians have read…

Earth is very dangerous planet to live on—at least under the present circumstances.  One day, in the age to come, the wolf will lie down with the lamb, the nursing child will play over the hole of the asp, and they shall not hurt or destroy in all God’s holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover…

In the rough and tumble world of online discussion of just about any current theological issue, eventually one is sure to come across a denunciation of the God of the Old Testament.  His detractors deride Him as cranky, vengeful, wrathful, unreasonable, arbitrary, blood-thirsty, and (in the always colourful words of Richard Dawkins), “as the most…

I have just finished watching a brief ten minute video on Youtube from 2008 entitled, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Nazi”, originally entitled “Happy Nazis”.  It is a chilling documentary which compares two photo albums received by the US Holocaust Museum.  One set of photos shows some of the upper level leaders and some women workers…

A number of years ago I was chatting with a co-worker at my secular job and she asked me to what church I belonged.  When I answered, “the Orthodox Church”, she responded, “Oh, that church is so retro”.  She was a sweet lady, and offered her comment as a simple observation, not a criticism.  Though I smiled back and said, “Thank you. We…

The concept of loving the sinner while hating the sin has fallen upon hard times.  Fallen man finds it very difficult to hold in tension the notion that one must love the sinner along with the notion that one must hate the sin which the sinner commits.  It is easy—far too easy—to equate the sinner with his sin and conclude that because the sin…

I suppose that most pastors have had the experience of a young parishioner approaching them privately and confiding in them their suspicion or decision that they were gay, bisexual, or transgender.  Such confusion is in the air, has the Nihil Obstat of both secular culture and governmental sanction, and also bestows a kind of odd popularity, making…

Recently I overheard a conversation about deacons and someone opined that if there were no deacons in the Church no one would notice, and that they could be eliminated with no ill effect at all, since they were simply a speed bump a priestly candidate encountered on the way to priestly ordination. I take the point, and admit that this accurately…

These past days have seen the departure from our midst of two men who have justly been described as “lions of the OCA”:  Fr. Steven Belonick and Fr. John Matusiak.  I knew them both. 

Fr. John and I regularly exchanged email, news, weather reports, and prayer requests in his capacity as editor of the “Reflections in Christ” column on the…