Reliance on God

Psalms for the 11th Day
56 57 58 59 60 61

Psalm 56

Reliance on God

Take pity on me, God, as they harry me,

pressing their attacks home all day.

All day my opponents harry me,

hordes coming in to the attack.

Raise me up when I am most afraid,

I put my trust in You;

in God, whose Word I praise,

in God I put my trust, fearing nothing;

what can men do to me?

All day long they twist what I say,

all they think of his how to harm me,

they conspire, lurk, spy on my movements,

determined to take my life.

Are they to go unpunished for such a crime?

God, in fury bring the nations down!

You have noted my agitation,

now collect my tears in Your wineskin!

Then my enemies will have to fall back

as soon as I call for help.

This I know: that God is on my side.

In God whose Word I praise,

in YHWH, whose Word I praise,

in God I put my trust, fearing nothing;

what can man do to me?

I must fulfil the vows I made You, God;

I shall pay You my thank-offerings,

for You have rescued me from death

to walk in the presence of God

in the light of the Living.

A recollection of Ise 伊勢

When I was at 伊勢神宮, the great shrine at Ise, Japan I had an experience at one of the smaller shrines off the beaten path. It was exactly like all other Shinto shrines, a building with a wide and deep porch all inside an enclosure. Across the front of the building were tied bundles of branches to either side of the gate. In my mind's eye, I suddenly saw the whole enclosed area filled with worshippers standing in the Orthodox fashion, and the bunches of branches were now interspersed with the icons typical of an Orthodox temple, and the central doors were now the Royal Doors. Everything amidst the peaceful forest. No more bowing and clapping hands, no more hanging up paper streamers to the kami. The presence of 大神, Okami, the living One, was there, gathering up His people like babies in a large silk blanket. It was a sudden and piercing insight with other facets I cannot even describe. This is not a vision, just what happens to the heart that is seeking the will of God, when the mind is in the heart.

I hadn't really thought of this since last April until today, when I recounted it in an email to a friend who likewise has been to Japan. The photo is of the shrine where these logismoí came to me.

"Please worship with us"

“Please worship with us” followed by the worship schedule, “9 a.m. and 11 a.m.,” if I remember correctly. This is what was up on the marquee in front of Mt. Tabor Presbyterian Church which I pass every Sunday on my way to church. I also pass this church several times on any other day and see this sign with the same message, or a seasonal adaptation, many times a week. Click the chunklet to the right to see what they advertise on their webpage.

I’ve been meaning to blog this before, and I just never got to it. But today, reading Fr Milovan’s excellent blog Again and Again, I found written in his post Ad Campaign this thought:

“For two years our Pan-Orthodox Clergy Brotherhood sponsored a billboard for Pascha with the words: Christ is Risen! As far as I know it hasn’t brought any outsider to any of our churches.”

“Hmm,” I thought to myself, “here’s a brother who is also a presbyter in the Church and also honest enough to admit the obvious, that some of the ways, maybe most of the ways, that we seek to bring ‘outsiders’ to Christ are largely ineffectual and, when you think about some of them, pretty ludicrous.” His post showed a photo of a billboard that says “Big Bang Theory. You’ve got to be kidding. — God”. Any of us who live or have lived in the Bible Belt have seen this kind of billboard. After all, God’s Word is being impugned! Someone has to defend Him!

Father’s post then reproduced a news item he had seen: ‘Orthodox’ buses will drive along London streets to oppose ‘No God’ ones. You can read the article yourself by clicking the link at the title above.

What a strange mindset the Church has sometimes! As if we had to fight satan on his own turf with his own base weaponry. His principality has nothing on the Kingdom of our God and His Christ as far as power is concerned. Yet we try to combat satan on a battlefield of his choice, letting him decide where he will attack, instead of us dictating the time and place which, if we only follow Jesus, our Stratigós (champion), would be quite different, giving us the advantage. After all, Jesus has already defeated death and hell, so satan has no where to go, but down.

I’ve often wondered who’s attracted by these church marquees aping the cinemas that say things like “Everyone Welcome,” and even advertise social events or entertainment opportunities under sanctimonious titles like “praise-a-thon” and what not. We don’t have to only imagine “what would Jesus do?” to attract disciples. He is alive and as active as He ever was, right now, and “He gathers the lambs.” That’s what Jesus is doing, here and now, and that’s what we’re doing too, if we’ve got our eyes on Him and do what we see Him doing.

Can you see Him doing anything like holding up a sign that says, “Join me for worship! Everyone welcome!” Our God doesn’t hold up signs for others to take notice; He is the Sign.

Jesus did not plead or beg for disciples. Neither did He accept just anyone who came to Him and volunteered. He didn’t do it then, He doesn’t do it now. He simply looks at you very intensely and says, “Follow Me!” It’s always our choice, and the call is daily issued, and always fresh. This is where the Church needs to put away its schemes and its toys and “go forth and make disciples of all nations,” following the Lord who is walking abroad in this world, seeking His lost sheep. It’s up to us, His little flock, to follow Him, and following Him to be disciples and to make disciples of all nations. That’s His call, that’s our calling.

As He said, “Let the dead bury the dead. Come, follow Me.”

Death by stoning

I’ve been reading the five books of Moses cover to cover, and I’m now up to chapter 9 of Numbers, in the NIV version. The version I have used all my adult life is the original Jerusalem Bible, but since receiving an NIV Bible as a gift, I’ve been reading and using it as well. My reading of Genesis through Deuteronomy is to get the feel of it in the NIV. There definitely is a difference, caused particularly by the different translations of individual Hebrew terms that are used.

One thing I’ve noticed in my reading is how severe the punishments were for offenses committed while the people of Israel were wandering in the desert. No less than ten offenses earned the punishment of death by stoning: Touching Mount Sinai while God was giving Moses the Ten Commandments (Exodus 19:13); an ox that gores someone to death should be stoned (Exodus 21:28); breaking the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36); giving one’s seed (presumably one’s offspring) to Molech (Leviticus 20:2-5); having a familiar spirit (or being a necromancer) or being a wizard (Lev. 20:27); cursing God (Leviticus 24:10-16); engaging in idolatry (Deuteronomy 17:2-7), or seducing others to do so (Deuteronomy 13:7-12); rebellion against parents (Deuteronomy 21,21); getting married as though a virgin, when not a virgin (Deuteronomy 22:13-21); sexual intercourse between a man and a woman engaged to another man (both should be stoned, Deuteronomy 22:23-24).

The foregoing are just those offenses whose punishment was explicitly defined as death by stoning. There were a great many others for which the punishment was just “death,” without specifying how the condemned were to die. Later, the rabbis finished the work of defining exactly what was to take place in the cases of capital punishment. The strange thing is, however, that there are very few mentions of such punishments being actually inflicted. There are three cases in the Bible in which a person was legally stoned to death as a punishment, and there are also five or six cases where someone was stoned by a mob, not in a legal fashion. A detailed case of stoning occurs in Joshua 7:24-26 when a man named Achan (עכן) was found to have kept loot from Jericho, a conquered Canaanite city, in his tent.

The time of Israel’s migration to the Promised Land was when Torah was given. At this time, there was no such thing as Judaism or Jews, only the Hebrew people, whom the living God YHWH had chosen as His special possession. Not just Torah, but particularly these laws of punishment, were given and followed during that stage in the process when God was fashioning Israel into His unique people, using a sort of shock treatment to winnow and purify them, because He knew that over time they would eventually stray and devolve back into living like the other nations. So there had to be a very severe beginning to ensure that at least a faithful remnant would still exist on earth at the appointed time, through whom would be born the Ransom for the sins of the nations—Jesus the Messiah, the Word of God in human form.

Even though the laws of punishment, such as death by stoning, were still “on the books,” by the time Judaism emerged as the religion of the Jews (as the people of Israel came to be known after the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom), the legal infliction of these punishments was rare. Doubts in Jewish society about the morality of capital punishment in general and stoning in particular were growing. For example, according to Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel in the time when the religious courts had authority over capital punishment, a court that executed more than 1 person in 70 years was considered a “bloody court.” The incident recorded in the Gospel (John 7:53-8:11) of the woman caught in adultery has to have been an instance of illegal infliction of the penalty of death by stoning, which was still probably rather common in the time of Jesus, at a grass roots level. So also would have been the stoning of the first Christian martyr, the deacon Stephen. Remember, even the Jewish authorities could not legally execute Jesus for committing what to them was blasphemy. “We have no law to put a man to death”
(John 18:31).

Modern-day Judaism is almost unanimous in rejecting the severe punishments found in the Torah, though with various explanations and justifications. Perhaps there are some Jews who today would revive these ancient punishments, but they are in the minority. Again, these punishments were ordered by the living God YHWH, for a specific purpose, to fashion Israel His people. They were never intended for the nations, as can be seen if one studies the Talmud, where it states that they apply only to the people of Israel. Seeing that even for themselves their purpose has been achieved, Jews of today do not apply the severe penalties found in Torah.

From a Christian viewpoint, the death of Jesus Christ put an end not only to the laws of sacrifice in the Jewish Temple, but also to the whole body of Jewish laws. Again, the account of the woman caught in adultery cited above is an example of where Jesus was heading, along with His famous sayings, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27) and, “The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Luke 6:5). Some would see this as religious evolution, others as the plan of salvation of the living God, whose purposes are not revealed to man all at once, but only as He wills, who Himself is changeless, though we learn more of Him as we progress through His dispensations.

What of death by stoning in today’s world? Perhaps there will always be instances of such punishments inflicted illegally by irrational mobs anywhere in the world where memory of such cruelty survives, but surely no civilized nation on earth would sanction it or enshrine it in its legal system. Think again. That which is called “the third great monotheistic religion” has such punishments enshrined not only in the legal systems where it holds sway, but in its very “scriptures.” This religion, claiming to be the last and greatest revelation of God to man, supplanting not only Christianity but Judaism as well, holds up and holds to a penal code more severe than even that of the ancient Hebrews.

The living God YHWH, the Only God there is, crafted them He chose as His own hereditary people and shaped and formed them by means of these severe statutes, in order to chasten, purify, strengthen and preserve them, who were also going to be the mother and brothers of His Son, the Saviour Jesus Christ. There is only one Israel the heir to the promises, and only one Christ, who come of the seed of Abraham through Isaac. Yet another came claiming to be a prophet, who reversed the story, seized the promise given to Isaac and laid it on Ishmael, who stole for his own tribe the rôle of God’s hereditary people, imitating the rigor and severity of the ancient laws.

If inflicting the penalty of death by stoning is the sign of the true faith, then we all know which true faith that is, and we should hurry to embrace it. Doubtless, such severe punishments will craft us into a perfectly pure, sinless and moral society as it has crafted many another people before us. It doesn’t matter that we will not be free, because look what freedom, what free will, has bought for us—societies impure, riddled with vice and sin, idolatrous beyond imagining. It would be for our own good, it would be worth it, to submit to the loss of freedom, if it meant an earthly paradise, where everyone would be happy, healthy, safe, at peace. Everyone, of course, except those who disobey the law, the divine law that comes from the prophet and his followers, everyone who deserves to die.

Yes, for them, death by stoning is really no less than their just reward from “God, the compassionate, the merciful, owner of the Day of Judgment.”

Ah, but what if the real God shows up?

A short Bible study

“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father. And whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in My name, I will do it.”
John 14:12-14

James and John, the two sons of Zebedee, came up to Jesus, saying, “Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask of You.” And He said to them, “What do you want Me to do for you?” They said to Him, “Grant that we may sit, one on Your right and one on Your left, in Your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” They said to Him, “We are able.” And Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you shall drink; and you shall be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized. But to sit on My right or on My left, this is not Mine to give; but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
Mark 10:35-40

There were also two others, criminals, led with Him to be put to death. And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on the right hand and the other on the left.
Luke 23:32-33

“Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven.”………….……………………………CLICK TO ZOOM
Matthew 10:32-33

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren't you the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don't you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”
Luke 23:39-43

Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the LORD, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O God of Jacob. Selah. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.
Psalm 24:3-10

Who is this King of glory?
The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle.

The magic of existence

Some people talk as though it were totally barbaric and unworthy of Him that God should have created a world in which such a thing as sin exists, that has so corrupted His chief creation, Man, that He now must punish him with eternal torment in fire, unless he accept the bloody death of a unique Man, who is also somehow His only-begotten Son, who sacrificed Himself voluntarily to satisfy the requirement of His angry heavenly Father, whose Law demands blood to compensate for its violation, as a ransom for his sins, so that he can be regenerated in sinlessness as his first forefather Adam was originally created.

This is like saying that God created a good universe into which His chief creature Man was placed with the expectation that he would always be of one will with Him, while at the same time allowing an evil agent into it, which He knew would corrupt Man’s will, and then forcing Himself to eternally punish this Man and all his descendents from their very births to eternal damnation for breaking a Law which He established and to which He is now bound, when He could have either not created that Law at all, or else overridden it for Man’s sake, or else not allowed the evil agent to deceive Man and cause the sin that must now be avenged, since God is holy and cannot tolerate sin.

Well, what would you have? A good God who created a good universe into which He placed a good creature, Man, who sometimes acts against what he knows intuitively is right by a standard he didn’t create but which the good God did, whose Son also entered that good universe and somehow was accidentally put to death but was rescued and resuscitated somehow, so that His teachings could be learned and followed, restoring Man, if not to his originally perfect and righteous state, at least to a state in which his moral failures are somewhat in control, allowing most men to live together in relative peace and safety and to enjoy a reasonable level of freedom and happiness?

That would be nice. That is how Man would like it. That is how Man in his natural state would like to see existence and give it meaning. That is how a civilised and worthy God would have set things up, that is, if He exists. Let’s have none of this sacrificial talk. Away with the barbaric demand for blood by an angry God, who is unfit to be called Father if He has to send His only Son to a humiliating, bloody, excruciatingly painful death, to save His creatures from a sinfulness He almost willed them to have, to save them from an eternal and fiery torment that He imposes on all who reject His love. His love? Would a loving God have such a plan? Would He create beings only to torture them for not being His robot slaves?

With all due respect to those who try to prove God loving, righteous, rational, and worthy of our praise by departing from the words of holy and divine scripture to paint a picture of Him in colors that are pleasing to our sense and standard of right and wrong, of what we call love, and mercy, and what we would honor as holy—I know what they are trying to do, to make God lovable so that we will love Him and believe in Him—this strategy in the end does not produce the effect in us that the Word of God was revealed to produce, does not raise us out of our mortal human reason to immortal divine faith, does not deliver us from death and bring us to true life, does not equip us for and acculturate us to what we can only call (because it is just the other side of our ontological “event horizon” and we cannot express it any other way) life eternal.

The real universe, not the one that scientists explore, test, measure and define by human standards, not the one that sociologists and historians archive and try to understand, not the one that moralists and would-be theologians devise as a frame of reference to interpret the results of the studies of the other two groups, but the real universe—what really exists, what really operates and animates all that we can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel and philosophize—is so beyond our human capacities as to be conveyable to us only in what seems miraculous or magical, or else so out of sync with what we should have expected that it seems barbaric and primitive in the extreme.

Not that real universe, but its Creator, has told us about that existence which lies just beyond our human nature’s “event horizon” by taking up a literature as the vehicle of His Word, and that is what we call the Holy Bible. Why holy? Because it is, like Him, totally other, fully incomprehensible to those who would fit it into the container of their minds alone. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not grasped it. The Bible teaches us, as a mother teaches her toddler using baby talk, how to take the first steps into that real universe where there is no other map that we can yet read, where there are features that could harm or even destroy us in our present state of being and level of maturity if we met them without warning.

We must listen very carefully, mimic and memorize the instructions just as we receive them, even in the limited language that we know thus far, because for us, where we are headed, where we have no choice but to be headed, is a state that now can only seem to be the magic of existence. It will only be magic until we find out and understand what lies behind it, until we find ourselves actually and even factually crossing that “event horizon” that limits our mortal, human vision, until by faith we come to immortal, divine being.

Théosis.

Looking for you

Lately, India has been on my mind a lot more than usual. I have a very long personal history with India going back to my teen years.

At about the age of 13, I picked up a book from my parents’ library, a novel about a girl my age growing up in India, that had a chapter entitled Krishna the Joyous. I also read H. G. Wells’ bulky 2-volume History of the World, which had lots of line drawings of pagan gods, among them Ganesh the elephant-headed god and, again, Krishna with his flute.

Later, in my college years and a little beyond, George Harrison brought to our attention the Hare Krishna movement through his music and then, suddenly, there they were, chanting and playing their weird instruments, finger cymbals, mridangas (my favorite, a type of drum), and jumping up and down with ecstatic fury all around town. In Edmonton, Alberta, where I lived after college, I used to visit the Hare Krishna temple, chant in Sanskrit, partake of bhagavad-prasadam (consecrated food), and read their books, but I never took the plunge. Why? Well, because of Jesus. He is real, Krishna is only a beautiful story.

Back to my interest in India, and even in one Indian religion, the Hare Krishnas, what attracted me to them was the beauty and joy evident in their worship. When I read their beliefs, though I could see instantly that it was all based on classical mythology, I was impressed by two things: They believe that there is only one God, whom they identify with the Krishna of the myths; and their scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, seemed to have verses that were borrowed from the gospel according to Saint John. That made me think that somehow their form of Hinduism had been influenced by Christian ideas and was better than the others.

Mind you, all this was before I had accepted Jesus Christ at the age of 24. I was, of course, still dealing in what C. S. Lewis called “boys’ philosophy,” and hadn’t yet come to realize the objective reality of our situation—born into a sinful world, and headed for Gehenna. Once that fact is grasped, one doesn’t care a fig anymore for myths, beautiful or otherwise, but only for Him who alone can deliver us from eternal death, Him who tramples death by death and gives life to those in the tombs.

The whispers of the Truth arrive even in the ears of peoples who walk in darkness, begetting in them the beginnings of faith, but in Whom they do not know, and so teachers and prophets arise among them, taking the best they can find from their human speculations, from myths, from ancient tales handed down, and religions are created that approach the Truth yet still fall short. It’s the universal, world-wide story of man looking for God. But this is, simply put, not how it works. Man’s search for God is nothing compared to God’s search for man.

Starting with Eden, it was not Adam and Eve who went looking for God, “but Yahweh God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ He asked.” God was looking for man. Later, though Noah could see that the world was full of wickedness, he had no plan, no work to do to fix this problem, but then, “God said to Noah, The end has come for all things of flesh…” and gave him the instructions as to what he was to do. Not Noah’s search for God, but God’s search for a man who would obey Him. Our first father Abraham, though he lived among an idolatrous people and was offended, he would have remained there, had not “Yahweh said to Abram, Leave your country, your family and your father’s house, for the land I will show you…” Again, not man’s search for God, but a living and caring God looking for man. Throughout the Bible, this story, this true story, is repeated over and over again. It’s true that in Psalms, we read things like, “I have sought You with my whole heart, do not let me stray from Your commandments,” but these words are the prayers of one whom God has already found. God looked for him, found him, and now he seeks God. It’s not that we don’t look for God, but that’s not how we find Him: He looks for us, He finds us, we accept Him and what He has done for us, and now we look for the God whom we know, to please Him who is our Saviour and Lord.

In all the myths, you never hear of a god looking for man, only men looking for gods. When they don’t find them, since they know that there must be a “divine something,” they comfort themselves with man-made gods and religions. Planting these seeds, they obtain trees which bear fruit after their own kind, from ancient times down to the present, fruit that may give wisdom and knowledge, but can never give eternal life.

But here we have a God, the God, who is looking for man, and when He finds him, there is no such thing as religion anymore. “I saw that there was no temple in the city since the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb were themselves the temple.” When He finds us, He plants in us His own seed, that grows in us and bears fruit after its own kind, fruit that will last, the fruit of eternal life. He is always looking for man. He is looking for me. He is looking for you.

All for one and one for all

I haven't done this before, but I am republishing a blog post from September, 2006, without changing anything, just to bring it to the attention of new visitors to this blog, because "the time is close."

“All for one and one for all”
is best known as the motto of the characters in the book The Three Musketeers, by the nineteenth-century French author Alexandre Dumas. All the members of a group support each of the individual members, and the individual members pledge to support the group. At the end of a very long day, as two friends and I sat together in a coffeehouse, just before we broke up our session, those words came to mind, “All for one and one for all.” I blurted them out, because somehow they indicated for me what we had just experienced—a session—sitting together in the presence of the Lord and worshipping “in Spirit and in Truth” by letting ourselves communicate and share what the Lord is doing with us.
In a coffeehouse? Yes.

There, in a coffeehouse, we met together, and our invisible Lord was in our midst, teaching us His precious and all-powerful Word through our discourses with each other, helping us to understand that our lives, which we three had given to Him, really are now in His mighty and yet tender hands. There, a few hours of chrónos time were plucked out of this plummeting age and, transformed into kairós time, were laid up for us in the “city not made with hands.”
One of us, a man I know in Christ, spoke at one point with such calm passion and Christ-like simplicity and order, about the lives we have been given back by Jesus, lives of willingness to suffer for His name, all I could say, over and over, after each pause in his voice, was AMEEN, but softly, so as not to interrupt him. He spoke like the good angel I know him to be. Almost never have I heard such a discourse from a priest, and certainly never from anyone, except in the writings of the Fathers, expressed with such God-imploring humility.

Kept coming to my mind the remembrance of the new martyrs of Russia who, though young in years like my brother, were wise like the ancient Fathers. They struggled against an atheistic Christ-hating state, refusing to take the “mark of the beast” in any form. They suffered for the Truth, and the wonder-working faith that was the fruit of their endurance, fed each other as they were, one by one, led as Christ's innocent lambs to the slaughter. Two of the young men pictured met this fate, one came through it alive. Yet their three-fold unity mirrored the three-fold radiance of the all-holy God, the Almighty, the Deathless, the unearthly Triad, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

What is my purpose in writing this? I need to memorialize those moments which I shared with my brother and sister in Christ.
I cannot evade testifying that there is Truth on earth, even now. Defying the barking dogs in their mangers who do not go into the Kingdom of Heaven themselves yet prevent those who want to from going in, Jesus walking among us still casts the money-changers from His Father's house, crying out, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, for to such as them belongs the Kingdom of God!”

When I was not much older than you, adelphós mou kai adelphí mou, while persecution still raged in Russia, there was a book, Russia's Catacomb Saints, by I. M. Andreyev, that had this symbol in the frontispiece, saying “This book is dedicated to the Christian Martyrs, today in Russia, tomorrow in America.” I pondered then what form this martyrdom would take. Now, thirty years later, the words are coming true, and the form of our martyrdom is gradually appearing, and I am alive to see that this will be your cross, and I want to share it with you. What is different and perhaps even more cruel than an atheistic Christ-hating state is what we have to face now, in America… I cannot even say it, but you know what it is, because you have already seen in your young lives what the divine, God-breathed scriptures was telling us of, when Jesus said, “They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God. They will do such things because they have not known the Father or Me. I have told you this, so that when the time comes you will remember that I warned you.” (John 16:2-4 NIV)

The time is now very close. “O gar kairós engýs” (Revelation 1:3). That is why we are reading the Apokálypsis more and more, even in Greek, to understand its message intimately and spiritually—not like the expounders of end times theoretica—but as men and women of faith, “who follow the Lamb wherever He goes” (Revelation 14:4). How can we know that the time is very close? We can see what is happening to the churches. Though we do not abandon our institutional churches, we cannot let ourselves be trapped in them. The time is now very close. We do the work we see our Father doing and, following Jesus, in company with Him, we know and accept His great commission, to go forth with Him to seek that which was lost. And where Jesus is, there is the Holy Spirit, there is the Church. “With so many witnesses in a great cloud on every side of us, we too, then, should throw off everything that hinders us…” (Hebrews 12:1 JB).

“It is all clear to me now, either Christianity is fire,

or there is no such thing.

I just want to wander through the world, calling,

‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.’

And to accept it if people revile me
and say all manner of evil against me.”

Maria Skobtsova (1891-1945)

Dying and reviving gods

The theme of death and resurrection is a common one in the religions of mankind, starting from the earliest ages. The Egyptian Osiris, the Akkadian Tammuz, the Greek Adonis, and yes, according to Wikipedia, the Christian Jesus. All of these are listed, and many more, under headings of mythology, yes, even under Christian mythology. You can’t blame Wikipedia; they have to stay objective.

What all of these deities, except Jesus, have in common is that they are all in some special way related to the annual cycles of vegetation. Even the Canaanite god Baal is a dying and reviving god. Fraser’s The Golden Bough has taken us on an imaginative, guided tour of many of these deities, and C. S. Lewis has easily debunked the lumping of Jesus into this group of vegetation myths in his writings, and I have nothing to add to either of these.

What I have been thinking of is the effect of these dying and reviving gods on their worshippers. We have little to go on except the historical record of some of their rites, but not much on what, if any, was the moral effect they had. This is where, I think, there is a big difference between Jesus Christ, the only historical figure known to have been executed and resurrected, and all these other gods.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ, even if the world does not accept its reality, has an effect on His followers that is consistent and can be documented from the earliest times until now. In fact, one does not have to be a scholar to research this effect: it is open to anyone who dares to follow Jesus, not just study Him.

Everyone who has followed Jesus has had this experience: There is always something in them which they cannot at any cost keep and still follow Jesus. For some it is a specific experience they desire, something they want to be, or have or do, which they cannot be, have or do and still, in good conscience, claim to follow the Master. Why is this?

Because Jesus is the Word of God, the only Teacher of mankind, and there is a book, the Holy Bible, the only divinely revealed scriptures ever given to humanity, which claims to be the written image of Who He is. Jesus said to His disciples, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.” Christians have something from Jesus that the devotees of the dying and reviving gods did not have, divinely revealed scriptures, the Hebrew Old Testament, and the Greek New. These two scriptures mean endless trouble for those who want to keep living in the ordinary human way and still try to please God. In fact, they say it’s impossible.

And so, that’s the predicament we find ourselves in, with Jesus.
This is why the only true dying and reviving deity is paradoxically called the Living One, the one who was dead but is alive, while His remedy for His disciples’ dis-ease is, in fact, Death.

Though He was Himself God, He humbled Himself, hiding His glory (as do many of the pagan gods in the myths when they come down to man), assumed the condition of a slave (this none of the pagan gods was able to do), and became as all men are, experiencing with us and for us all that it means to be a human being, including physical death. Somehow, His work for us has achieved what man could not do on his own: He reopened for us the gates of Paradise, and gave us access to the Tree of Life which, it turns out, was the very Tree on which He was suspended between heaven and earth.

But back to us, we cannot have things the way we want and still follow Him on the path He led the repentant thief, the path to Paradise.

Religion would make rules for us, forbidding this and that, and give us methods of self-denial that, if followed religiously, would somehow make us worthy of the Garden, but the makers of religion hide from us and from themselves the certain truth of Christ’s own words, that if we want to live, we must die. Back we are to acknowledging that there are some things we cannot take with us when we follow Jesus into Life, and among those things there will always be at least one that we know we cannot live without. Hence, we must die.

Dying and reviving gods, before Jesus, there were none in reality: all were but myths, mankind’s dreaming of heaven.

Dying and reviving gods, after Jesus, literally following Jesus, there have been, are and will be many: these are they who, laying down their lives for love of Him, follow the Lamb wherever He goes and, like Him, dying they live forever.

Sheep without a shepherd

It’s truly ironic how eloquence or any other personal excellence can be a trap that keeps one from entering the Kingdom of God.

There are people who imagine that Christianity, or any religion, is just an organized framework whose purpose is to elevate humanity from lower to higher cultural levels, and that when this goal has been achieved, the usefulness of religion is finished. To them it seems entirely justified that religion should wither away or be maintained only for sentimental, historical or artistic reasons. Look around you, and see if there isn’t evidence that actually substantiates their view. And it isn’t just people who’ve left the Church (because they feel that they’ve “graduated” and no longer need organized religion) who think this way; it’s also people who still “go to church,” indeed even people who “run the whole show.” For this last group, religion is to be maintained for an additional reason—because it makes good business sense.

After a long wait of many weeks during which appointments were made and then broken, I finally made it to my first meeting with a new priest, a man of marked intelligence and, though a recent convert, fully fluent in the Greek language and conversant in all of our many customs and traditions, a literal genius. The bishop must’ve thought he was really doing us a favor to send us one like him, who could preach circles around our Greek assistant pastor (who wasn’t deemed ready to take over the responsibilities of so great a parish, when our former proistámenos was “rewarded” for his good job of raising money by being transferred to a larger community in California). It must’ve been thought best to let the assistant pastor stay on for the time being, so as not to traumatize the parish by transferring both priests at the same time.

Initially impressed by his eloquent sermons, I was beginning to exercise some caution after noticing that our new proistámenos (yes, this honorific title, usually reserved for pastors of long and faithful service, was bestowed on him quite soon) was in the habit of leading scripture by his own ideas, instead of letting his ideas be led by scripture. Knowing this to be a common failing of beginners kept me from passing premature judgment on his ministry which was only starting—he had never been in charge of a parish before. My meeting with him, I thought, would be a good opportunity for us to share our spiritual life stories with each other, what I usually call our testimonies. I hoped it would let us see each other a little more authentically, because talking dispels mere imagining about another.

Outside, maybe in a nearby park or some other “neutral” location, was where I wanted to meet, but he wanted to get together in his office, so I consented. At the time I didn’t realize this was a security measure he had to take. Part of the mystique of the professional clergyman is to always keep the parishioner aware of his position as laity, and office visits are one of these methods.
So we began our visit.

We both shared a little bit about ourselves, his journey to Orthodoxy, my pilgrimage to Christ. He had come from a Baptist type “tradition,” whereas I had been brought up in a Catholic type “tradition,” though not Roman Catholic. I put tradition in quotation marks because this is not the way I talk about faith.

To me, faith is not a “tradition” but rather a living and ever-present reality, or it is nothing at all. You can’t pass it down to your descendants directly; it’s something that must be apprehended, accepted and applied afresh in every generation. Knowing this, I can accept all the externals of the Orthodox faith for what they are—a complete tool kit for working out the details of one’s Christian life in accordance with scripture, within a community in which salvation is possible. The background “music” of my life is this Orthodox faith, it’s always the “given” in every equation, it’s always been that for me at some level or another, and it’s the only dependable feature of human life I’ve ever known, it’s always there, dead or alive.

So we talked, and talked, and talked.

Little did I suspect at the time, that I’d finally found a person who could talk more than me. To be fair, I think I talked more in that meeting than did the dear young father, although he’s won the war of words since then, if lengthy discourse is the criterion.

After the exchange of our pasts, the talk moved on to our presents. He told me how he had many plans for the parish, many changes, but that he would not be able to introduce them all at once, but only gradually because, as we all know, Orthodox don’t like change.
(A fast change in Orthodoxy, they say, takes about four hundred years. I hope that’s a joke.) On my side, I shared with him some of the things I was doing at the time, especially the Bible-reading ministry downtown that I shared with my co-laborer Brock. I also had brought with me a sampling of some of the booklets I publish and give away to people on request. I like to write.

As he was a new priest, I wanted to assure him of my support for him in his new ministry. In my dadly sort of way, I tried to lay before him some ideas about ministering in our community, reminding him that to be a presbyter in the Church is a call to love the people and serve them in such a way as to draw them to the life of salvation. He was now God’s bondservant, with no private life really, but only what was granted him from above; but that God would be faithful to supply all his needs and be strength in his weakness at all times and in every circumstance, so he need never be anxious about anything.

What’s more, I told him, there were many persons like myself, who already knew how to minister to others, who could teach, who could pray, who had various talents to use in building up the Body of Christ at our church, and were only waiting to be asked to help (not that many weren’t already doing things on their own inside church or outside it).

An important part of a presbyter’s job, I told him, is to know his congregation, to know who within it can accept a share of the ministry, so that a community consists of one or more presbyters assisted by ministry teams made up of laity. One or two priests cannot minister to eight hundred families. That’s not how the Church was set up to work in the first place. In some Orthodox communities, like the Ethiopians, roughly ten per cent of the men are ordained to some kind of ministry. So I tried to encourage him to start seeking out people to share his ministry with, and even offered the idea that he should find a small group of dedicated servants of God to pray with him regularly two or three times a week, with the sole purpose of asking God’s direction and blessing on the parish.

Then, he interrupted me at one point and said the most alarming thing I’ve ever heard come from the mouth of an Orthodox priest. He said, “But I am afraid of the people. I can’t trust them.” He elaborated, and again said (speaking for priests in general), “we are afraid of the people, we can’t trust them.”

I was stunned. Here I was, having just revealed my spiritual life, my ministry and prayer concerns, my essential faith to one whom I regarded as my priest, and now I was hearing that, as one of “the people,” I was a threat, I could not be trusted. The meeting made an abrupt turn at that point as I tried to understand better what he meant, but try as I might, I could not make sense of what he was telling me. Perhaps I didn’t try hard enough. Perhaps we were both tired out. The meeting had run over limit, the one hour morphing into two and a half. I should’ve warned him that I run on kairós time, not on chrónos time. I don’t think I even had a watch on that day.

Not faulting this priest, but just to bring up the point that he made, if it is true in any sense, for anyone, even if only for him, I have to ask, what then is the purpose of ministry in the Christian church? What does a man do, that we should call him “pastor,” or “father”?

One title means shepherd, the other means, well, begetter. In Orthodoxy we know that the presbyter, or priest, is a human icon or image of Christ among us, and that the honor we show him as priest is directed to the prototype, Christ the Great High Priest, and the mysteries we receive at his hands are actually received from Jesus. At least that is what I was taught by the priests who handed over the Orthodox faith to me. In every mystery Jesus is there—in Communion He gives Himself to us, in Baptism He baptizes us, in Marriage He pronounces the blessings over us, and so on. This is part of the reason and purpose of the ministry in the Church, but not all.

When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.
Mark 6:34 NIV

Lord, we are still that large crowd, so have compassion on us, because we are like sheep without a shepherd.
Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening.

In His presence

This poem by The Postman is so short that I needn't direct you to the link, but instead I will quote it directly. After you read it, please visit his blog to read his many other excellent testimonies in poetic form. If we must be poets, let us sing of Him.
That's what The Postman does.

He has just published two more exceptional poems: No Longer Free, and Thy Will Be Done, which I hope you will also read and be blessed.

Psalms 16:11
Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.

In HIS presence
Alone, I turned to the Lord,
In the sweetness of His fellowship
I wondered why I had not done this before,
Wondered why I had let go
Of such glimpses in the past!

And there I should remain
In prayerful decisiveness,
Day by day
In brokenness,
In the shadow of the Almighty;
There I will be led
Into the centre of HIS will!

Psalms 34:18
The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.

Isaiah 57:15
For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

To be more like Jesus

I too sometimes catch myself condemning sinners with the words of my lips, or with the words I have written (which are in some ways harder to take back). It usually happens, though, when my soul is mobilized by something outside me, like people who are being oppressed, or whatever.

When I stop and just get quiet, with the Lord being right there with me as He always is, it doesn't even enter my mind to judge or criticise even someone who has purposely wronged me. That's why I always retreat to that private chamber as often as possible, certainly every day, usually several times a day.

The world has a way of soiling our feet as we go about in it. Only Jesus can wash those feet clean again. And He is so faithful to forgive us and turn the other cheek to our sin.

[Based on the first comment left on this post, I have edited some phrases and placed them in square brackets. My apologies for possibly mis-reporting “news” items, but I do not watch TV or listen to the radio, and so whatever news I get is often at third or fourth hand. “…if new roofs be risen in the ancient cities, whose empire is it that now sways the world, and if any still survive, snared in the error of the demons?” as a desert father once asked.]

Earlier this week I heard mention that the mayor of my city has [been accused of] having sexual relations with [a young man] who was working with him, probably as an intern of some kind. This young man is now over 21. Upon hearing of this, I commented that it was too bad, but in my soul I felt no passion to condemn. It is so obvious to me after living a very tempestuous life, that the function of the Law is, as holy apostle Paul says, to simply tell us what is wrong. It's the prognosis, but not the cure. Only the living One, the only Lover of mankind, the only Physician, Jesus, can cure, but the medicine He applies is Death. For many “Christians” that is too severe a treatment, so they prefer to hobble along with the burden of their unforgiven sin weighing them down. In that condition, being too sick to live but afraid of Death, they yield to the kind of grouchiness that exhibits itself as judgmentalism.

Who has been forgiven much, loves much.

Back to the mayor. The men I work with here in engineering spent a part of one afternoon nit-picking the mayor and his public sin, and debating whether he should step down and why or why not. The consensus was that he step down. None of my co-workers are Christians, all are apostates or have never been Christians (I am not saying this with judgment, but as a demographic fact), yet they judged as harshly a man whom they don't even know by a standard they don't even acknowledge, as they complain that Christians judge.

I didn't know that Sam Adams was an openly practicing homosexual, a “gay” man, and I can't remember if I voted for him or not. If I had known he was gay, I probably would not have voted for him, simply because his personal baggage could cause trouble to the smooth functioning of the city government. But the odd thing is, those of my co-workers who live in my city most probably did vote for him to be mayor, because most of them approve of the “gay” lifestyle.

I didn't join in the debate, but inside my thought was, “Leave him alone. You elected him, and now you are condemning him for what he did, which is what you know he was likely to do.” The boy he [is accused of having] “molested” was one whom he was openly mentoring into the gay lifestyle, and that was known at the time. So why this hair-splitting? The boy grew up to be a man, and he now lives in the way he chose, based on his feelings and the advice of his “mentor.”

How sick our world is! How deceived we all are! Only by turning to Jesus, who is always near, can we be delivered “from this body of death,” by conquering death by death, as He did, and finally be freed from bondage so that we, like Him, can bring life to those in the tombs…

ὧν οὐκ ἦν ἄξιος ὁ κόσμος

Of whom the world was not worthy…
Hebrews 11:38

One of my favorite Bible verses, and may it be found true of me.
I know, however, that it is true of a young poet in India, who has again blessed me with these bright words…

One man who stood for God
One man against the multitude;
One man by faith in God
One man who condemned the world.

One man heaven seeks,
One man who will stand steady;
One man who will join them,
For whom the world was not worthy.

I am weak and foolish my Lord,
Too scared to even voice my thoughts;
But if you will have me and make me,
I will be that man! I will be that man!

These verses are taken from the complete poem, entitled Noah, which you can read by following this link:
Heb 11:38 The world was not worthy of them.

Freedom or slavery

As the purpose of this blog is not political, it is my intention to shy away from subjects merely political, and to focus on the purpose of human life, which for me and others means discipleship to Jesus Christ, and all that concerns it. Sometimes it's difficult to disentangle politics and religion, and this is especially true in the case of the movement called al-Islam, and so I have posted on the subject of al-Islam from time to time.

Long before it appeared in the U. S. Bill of Rights, freedom of speech was an ideal and a principle among many peoples, particularly the Greeks and the Jews, who each came at it from different directions, yet both arrived at the same place. Christianity is the heir to both Hellenism and Judaism, and so it's not surprising that the principle of free speech should have become enshrined in the U. S. constitution, whose authors were by and large men of Christian heritage.

What I want to say in this post is something very brief but still very important.

I would rather have the exercise of free speech for myself and every other human being, even at the risk of being slandered, mocked, lied to, seduced, tricked, and insulted, even at the risk of hearing the country I love vilified, the faith I espouse ridiculed, and the God I believe in blasphemed, than to let anyone or anything put a stop to it.

The new series of laws taking shape across the global village to limit the exercise of free speech will have the effect of killing it altogether. I think I am convinced that the exercise of free speech is the source of all other human liberties, of freedom itself, and that the curtailing of it is nothing less than the institution of slavery.

My favorite poet, Walt Whitman, the greatest American poet, put it very succinctly:

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth,
ever afterward resumes its liberty.

It is the "unquestioning obedience" which in my mind relates to the exercise of free speech.

Mankind's ancient enemy has not laid down and died, but like a lion is up and about, prowling through the world, looking for someone to devour. We know who he is, and we also can sense when he is at work in people and systems with which we have to do.

If the exercise of free speech is captured and subjected to regulation, forbidding people to tell the truth, allowing people to speak freely only when what they say is politically or religiously correct, then freedom is dead, and slavery reigns.

Here is an example of what I am talking about, though the link will take you to a blog which many will find deeply offensive, Infidel Bloggers Alliance, nonetheless it is something we must be aware of. The house of a near neighbor has caught fire in the night. Are we to go back to bed and slumber, thinking that the fire won't reach our own house? If your eyes are delicate, shield them from carnal profanity nearby and focus them on the post at issue, Geert Wilders To Be Charged For Making Anti-Islamic Statements.

Now that I've had my say on this issue, I will return to my usual preoccupation, to "keep those things which are written in it; for the time is near."

Confronting sin, confronting the sinner

With every start of a "brave new world" the people of God have to inspect their foundations, make sure that they're still built on the bedrock of Jesus' words, and be ready to follow their Lord wherever He goes. More and more this is apparent, as we see and hear "church" leaders and dignitaries mouthing not the Word of God but the ideologies of men, seeking their approval.

The Church Age and the age of Christian Empires is over. We're not in a post-Christian age, though, just a post-Church one. Where the Church as an institution has trouble in reaching the unsaved, the Church as people, you and me, can do what we see the Lord doing. Even today, He is out there, looking for His lost sheep. We can follow Him there, and do what we see Him doing.

"The Word of God is alive and active." Without our help in the form of commentaries and preaching, the plain and simple Word of Truth can convict souls of sin. The problem is, the sinner, as in the case of a person guilty of sexual sin, for example, homosexual acts, already has more than half the world preaching at him. Though the preaching is usually coupled with an invitation to accept God and His Word, the emphasis is placed on turning from the sin and living righteously. This the sinner cannot see himself doing. He may have tried it, and failed. Of course, he probably tried to live righteously by his own will power and hoped to achieve righteousness by his own efforts. That's precisely why he failed. Then, maybe even after trying this many times, he simply gave up, gave himself over to the sin, and decided, it's either God's fault, or else the scriptures need to be "interpreted" to include his particular sin as not sinful.

What the sinner has to understand, and what every Christian should understand, is that we cannot be righteous in the way humans think of righteousness. The Word says, "all our righteousness is filthy rags," and "the righteousness that comes by faith in the One who justifies the sinner," namely Jesus Christ, "the Righteous," is He in Whom our righteousness subsists. It is the righteousness of Christ that must cover us, not our own.

When the sinner understands this, then he can begin to have hope, and the healing of the soul, and deliverance from the bondage of sin and death, can begin to take place. It's when the sinner is confronted by his sin and the demands of the Law, without understanding this, that he has little or no desire to seek the Lord.
And can you blame him?

"What I desire is mercy, not sacrifice," says the Lord.

Mercy is not to accept the sin, but to accept and welcome the sinner with the good news, Jesus Christ risen from the dead, alive today, our righteousness and our justification, our savior, who saves us from sin and death.

How can we tell the sinner this, by our words or by the fruit of our lives in Christ which we, like trees planted by His Father, bear for others?

The dignity of a Christian

"When you come to Scripture, you can't just find some text and come up with some interpretation that no one has ever thought of before and have a plausible argument that it's true. There's a saying that I like to quote: "All that's old might not be gold, but if it's new it can't be true" -- and when it comes to Scripture that's certainly true. If you read Scripture and you find something that after 2,000 years no one has ever thought of until you came along, you know it's wrong."

The passage quoted above from an Orthodox blog that I sometimes visit, is an example of the kind of Orthodoxy (forgive me for saying this) that I abhor. It essentially says nothing about the Word of God, but says a lot to insult the intelligence and undermine the dignity of a Christian, not to mention what it does to project to outsiders the impression that Orthodoxy is monolothic, dogmatic, and priest-ridden.

The same blog also linked to Fr Stephen's excellent post on the Word of God which I linked to under the title The Word of God, but on this blog the link took a characteristically belligerent tone in the title chosen, What Jesus is… and the Bible ain't. I supposed it's part of the author's style to say things like that, but to me, it seems disrespectful.

In teaching such things as, "If you read Scripture and you find something that after 2,000 years no one has ever thought of until you came along, you know it's wrong," it cuts off right at the start the confidence that a believer should have in his ability to stand on his own two feet by God's grace, and implies that only "the Church," whoever that is supposed to mean, can rightly interpret scripture. But if that were true, why are we anointed (chrismated) for the gift of the Holy Spirit?

I thank God that the Greek priests who taught me as I was growing in Orthodoxy did not have this attitude or ever say such things to me. Instead, they encouraged me to read the Bible constantly, to attend liturgy regularly, to make regular confessions and seek counsel when needed, and to learn the true meaning of scripture by living out its words in my life, not just by sitting alone and thinking without doing. Sometimes I wonder if that's not what some church authorities do, thinking without doing, that they should come up with such distortions of Orthodoxy.

I know where the priest who authored the passage quoted is coming from, but he needn't exert himself or his and the Church's authority in this way, but instead lead others to Christ and to the true faith by living a life in Christ and seeking the Kingdom first.
Heresy has a way of destroying itself without any help from us, according to one of my teachers, Archimandrite Vasileios.

I am not the first or the only one to interpret the scriptures the way I do, even when an application I make is not one that is shared by many others or can be found in a "church father." To declare that God cannot reveal to "one of the least of these" a meaning or an application of scripture that is unique and new is to muzzle the gift of prophecy, and to stifle that which the Holy Spirit teaches us personally and often individually, as He sculpts us into the shape of the image He created us to be. "Do not quench the smoking flax."

What I am asserting is not heresy, but the very way of discipleship to the Lord Jesus. Yes, "by their fruits you will know them," but this applies to clergy as well as laity in the Church. What we find who study the scriptures "with the fear of God, with faith and love," even without a priest standing behind us looking over our shoulders, is that the Holy Spirit teaches one and the same thing to us and to those who came before, because He always points to Jesus, who is "the Author and Finisher of our faith," and the only Truth, yes, the only Christ.

I recently came across a screwball website that declares that the Church was not founded on the day of Pentecost but had its beginnings in the Old Testament, and the author gave eleven scriptural references to prove this. I looked at the references and they all made sense. I could see the point the author was making. Such things have been written even by Orthodox sometimes. There was nothing wrong with his reasoning. Yes, in some sense, the Church has existed since the call of Abraham, or even earlier, from Adam. But this, though it is a possible way of looking at the issue, is simply not how the Church has expressed itself from ancient times, in every place, and by all believers (as described by Vincent of Lerins in his Commonitory).

Where this website and its author went wrong, and very badly wrong, is in raising his opinion against the universal witness of the Church. This is the sort of thing that the priest whose passage I quote above is reacting against, but his reaction is just as damaging to the Body of Christ as is the error that he would oppose.

So heretics quote the Bible (to prove their opinions), and their opponents quote the Church Fathers (or worse yet, their own opinions which they attributed to the Fathers), but in the end this kind of confrontation does nothing but "destroy those who are listening."

Back to the issue of understanding the Bible, it's worth the risk to encourage the Christian people, who are called "a royal priesthood and a holy nation," to study the Word of God and seek to understand it by incorporating it into our lives, thereby all becoming theologians in Christ, as opposed to having it handed to us by "professional theologians" (I assert there is no such thing), and keeping us at the level of spiritual infants. The holy apostle Paul teaches us, that we are to be infants where sin is concerned, but adults in spiritual things, in understanding, in wisdom, in purity and self-control, in love for the brethren.
This is the dignity of the Christian.