Date: 8/19/07
FOR THOSE WHO WOULD LIKE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY
About True God
About True God
Articles & Resources:
Article 1. The Tragedy Of Dogma?
Author: Dr. Clark Carlton
Source: http://audio.ancientfaithradio.com/carlton/fandpweek16_pc.mp3
Article 2. Mark Pickup
Author: Frederica Mathewes-Green
Source: http://www.frederica.com
Article 3. The Horn of Joy: A Meditation on Eternity and Time, Kairos and Chronos
Author: Christos Jonathan Hayward
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MP3 Corner Presents:
Faith and Philosophy - Reflections on Orthodoxy and Culture
Clark Carlton was reared as a Southern Baptist in middle
Tennessee. He was enrolled as a Raymond Brian Brown Memorial Scholar at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC when he converted to the Orthodox Church. Clark earned his B.A. in philosophy from
Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, TN and and M.Div. from St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in NY, where he studied under the renowned church historian, Fr John Meyendorff. He also holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Early Christian Studies from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. At present, Clark is assistant professor of philosophy at
Tennessee Tech University, where he teaches the history of philosophy as well as philosophy of religion and logic. He writes on a number of subjects and has had articles published in the Journal of Christian Bioethics, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, and the Journal of Early Christian Studies. Dr. Clark is also the author of ”The Faith” series from Regina Orthodox Press: The Faith: Understanding Orthdoox Christianity; The Way: What Every Protestant Should Know about the Orthodox Church; The Truth: What every Roman Catholic Should Know about the Orthodox Church; and The Life: The Orthodox Doctrine of Salvation.
Today’s Program Presents: The Tragedy Of Dogma
No one wakes up and decides to become a heretic. It happens gradually.
To download the following link simply Ctrl + Click(point and Left click while holding Ctrl control button on keyboard) To Follow Link (No Viruses There)
http://audio.ancientfaithradio.com/carlton/fandpweek16_pc.mp3
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Frederica Mathewes-Green
Mark Pickup
Here’s the problem. The audience, a couple of hundred doctors and nurses, are clustered along conference tables and in rows of chairs all around the room, waiting for the next speaker. But he’s still a good twenty feet from the podium. Between him and that microphone, up on a raised dais, there’s a short flight of stairs. And that’s the problem.
Folks from the college are setting up a sheet of embossed steel designed to be laid over the stairs. But it’s angled too steeply for someone in a motorized wheelchair to ride up, and when the top rests on the platform the bottom doesn’t reach all the way to the floor. In the end, Mark Pickup manages to climb the stairs with the help of a cane, while others pull his wheelchair up the incline.
As he settles back into the chair and begins his speech, Mark doesn’t refer directly to this obstacle. Instead, he starts with the topic of euthanasia. The stretch isn’t as broad as it seems. Pushing the eject button on disabled and elderly humans is the natural ending to a sentence that can begin with something as unintentional and apparently benign as a dais barricaded with stairs.
“Assisted suicide means excluding people. And I don’t want to be excluded. I want to be included,” Mark says in a firm, clear voice. As with actor Christopher Reeve, the use of a wheelchair does nothing to diminish Mark’s noble bearing or contradict his rugged profile. “I want life with dignity, not death with dignity. After almost 18 years with this disease I have come to the conclusion that we do not bestow dignity on a person by injecting them with poison when they’re at their lowest point.
“Generally speaking, people don’t die with any more dignity than they have lived with. Dignity is not an event. It is a process.”
Over the last eighteen years Mark, now 48, has had opportunity to see first-hand the many subtle ways that the disabled can treated with less than full human dignity. It was a more radical shift for him than it would be for many of us, because a couple of decades ago Mark was not just a member of the able-bodied in-crowd, he was out in front: skiing, swimming, running, playing guitar, “a very active dad” to his two young kids.
Then one day “I went dead from the waist down,” Mark told Citizen. There followed two years of tests and treatments, ups and downs. Finally, in 1984, there was a diagnosis: Multiple Sclerosis.
The disease is “raucous,” Mark says, unpredictable in its effects, tantalizing its victim with glowing remissions and then smashing them with unimagined loss. Mark and LaRee had to give up their split-level home; the stairs were unmanageable. Mark lost his job with the Canadian Civil Service. More physical degeneration was yet to come. LaRee, soft-spoken with warm brown eyes, says, “If someone had told us then that we would be at this point today, I would have been scared to death.”
Mark agrees. “If someone had said to me that I would go on this roller-coaster of health, that the legs would be weak, I would lose use of my arm, that I would go incontinent, that I would have visual problems, I would have said that there is no quality of life.
“And if they had said, ‘There’s a wheelchair in your future’”— Mark pauses and gestures firmly– “I would have said ‘No. No. No.’”
However, as Mark likes to say, “Quality of life is a moving target.” When disease does damage that seems unbearable, when it strips away abilities that seem essential, it’s revealed that they weren’t essential after all. The unbearable is met with strength equal to the burden. Standards of what constitutes “the good life” continually readjust. “What gives my life quality today is not being able to run or swim or ski,” Mark says. “It’s being able to love and to be loved. To think that I am still making a contribution to the world, whether I am or not.”
Too often, a person entering disability feels shattered and suicide, assisted or not, looks like a release. Mark cites a study by a rehabilitation specialist, Walter Lawrence, of
British Columbia: among people with high-lesion spinal cord injuries, 90% want to commit suicide. Five years later, only 5% contemplate suicide. Quality of life is a moving target. Though a twenty-year veteran of the pro-life movement, Mark’s situation has led him to concentrate increasingly on disability and euthanasia issues. It’s a work that others toiling in the vineyard particularly admire. “Mark Pickup is one of the most eloquent voices in North America arguing on behalf of the inherent equality of all human life,” says Wesley J. Smith, a prominent commentator on bioethical issues and author of *Culture of Death*. “His nobility, his passion, his vision, are a badly needed antidote to those voices who, oh, so smoothly, argue that some lives are expendable. We ignore Mark Pickup at our own peril.”
John Kilner, the president of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, agrees. “Mark Pickup brings a rare blend of experience, heart, and mind to today’s pressing issues of life and health in a God‑honoring way. There is real passion and integrity in what he says. I thank God for his courage and wisdom.”
These days another facet of the life issues is drawing Mark’s attention: stem cell research. In an essay in Canada’s “National Post,” Mark described how German researchers had experimented with the use of embryonic stem cells in animals and achieved what they termed a “critical breakthrough” for the treatment of debilitating diseases like Parkinson’s and MS. Other scientists had announced similar results, and stem cell transplants had been performed on about fifty people with MS.
“For years, I have lived with the fear that my next address may be a nursing home,” Mark wrote. “I have been haunted and taunted by the thought that I may become one of those sad lumps of humanity propped up in wheelchairs, passing monotonous days, staring out nursing home windows hoping for a visitor.”
The hope that a medical treatment could reverse that, could enable Mark to dance with his wife, ski with his son, or walk his daughter down the aisle, is nearly irresistible. After all, embryonic raw material is plentiful: embryos wait in fertility clinic freezers for parents who don’t intend to implant them, and they will just be thrown away. A research lab can even mix sperm and eggs in a petri dish and create their own handy embryos. Or, by destroying the nucleus from an egg and inserting material containing the patient’s own
DNA, a lab can create an embryo clone–all the better to harvest stem cells that perfectly match its donor’s. However, Mark concludes, the cost is too high. “I’d have to…look the other way from the reality that my deliverance was gained at the expense of *another* life.” A cure gained by destroying embryonic life would destroy Mark’s integrity, and in a sense his very humanity. “To gain my freedom from disease, I would become more wretched by accepting the fruits of robbing another of life, existence and a place in the world. No! The cure would only increase the torment.” As Mark notes, “It’s like a Stephen King novel.”
Some celebrities, like Michael J. Fox and Christopher Reeve, have been lobbying in favor of embryonic stem cell research, but others are asking the same questions Mark does. File it under “strange bedfellows”: while Nancy Reagan presents her husband Ronnie as one who could benefit from such research, gay-rights activist Andrew Sullivan says he would refuse the cells as treatment for his own HIV. After identifying the embryo at this early stage by its technical name, “blastocyst,” Sullivan goes on:
“One might conceivably justify allowing extra blastocysts to be created and lost as collateral damage in an artificial insemination (although, the more I think about this, the less defensible it seems). But to turn around and use those extra blastocysts for experimentation is a completely separate step. It is to treat human life instrumentally. I know of no better description of evil.”
As Sullivan notes, Federal law forbids the killing of a bald eagle; it also forbids the destruction of an eagle’s egg. “And once a blastocyst is killed, the human being coiled inexorably inside it is no more. If that isn’t killing, what is? And why are we more coherent when it comes to eagles than when it comes to humans?…If my life were extended one day at the expense of one other human’s life itself, it would be an evil beyond measure.”
Sullivan notes another avenue of hope: “it’s possible to cultivate stem cells from other sources.” And therein lies hope. Evidence is gathering that stem cells from adults, or from newborns’ umbilical cords, may be just as effective as stem cells from embryos. The argument in favor of the latter is that embryonic cells are more vigorous and active, growing faster than adult cells. But that ebullience may, in fact, be a drawback.
In an experiment reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, the brains of Parkinson’s patients were injected directly with fetal brain cells. Some fifteen percent of them began to produce too much of the brain chemical that controls movement, with resulting flailing and writhing and uncontrollable chewing, symptoms that are not reversible. A cell whose primary selling point is reckless growth may not be the best thing after all. In fact, another outcome of uncontrolled cell growth is called a tumor. Perhaps a slower pace, both in cell development and in research itself, is warranted. As Andrew Sullivan says, “Are we currently beset by the problem of scientific breakthroughs that aren’t fast enough? Surely the opposite is true (or at least also true): We are beset by scientific breakthroughs that are occurring far faster than we have the moral language or the experience to deal with.”
Mark began to gain the moral language to deal with suffering a few years before he became ill. “I converted in 1980,” Mark says. “I had a problem with alcohol. No, I was an alcoholic.”
Though Mark had not been practicing his faith seriously, he could not shake the convictions instilled by devout and honorable parents throughout his childhood. “I had been given so much as a child, and was I going to bestow an alcoholic’s life to my children? Tell me how that fit,” Mark says. “I had been given so much that I of all people should give my children a good upbringing. When I realized ‘you don’t have control of this at all,’ the Lord led me out of alcoholism.”
LaRee was not a believer and wasn’t sure how much she liked this change. She laughs as she describes asking herself, “Which is worse, having the pastor over for dinner, or having Mark booze out?” Mark would call her over when he was reading the bible “and I’d go ‘O brother’” she says, rolling her eyes. Eventually she started sneaking looks at the Scriptures when Mark wasn’t around. “I didn’t want him to know he was having an influence on me.”
When the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis was delivered, LaRee was a new Christian with a still-wobbly faith. She considered divorce: “Do I want this? Should I run now?” In fact, Mark says, 80% of MS patients see their marriages fall apart. But LaRee had already seen the effects of divorce in the lives of each of her four siblings and her parents. “I saw the damage divorce could do. Do you know anybody who went through a divorce and it actually made things better? Very few. Besides, do people think they can run away and never have a health problem? It’s going to come one way or another.”
Mark takes seriously the idea of a “watershed moment,” those points in life when a decision changes everything. Deciding against divorce was a watershed for LaRee, he says. If she had gone that direction “it would have changed who she is. And if I accepted fetal stem cell therapy, it would change who I am. Is it tempting? Sure it is. But it would compromise not just my Christianity, but my very humanity.”
While serious injury may require a difficult adjustment, usually it’s stable; a disease like MS means that the picture is always changing. “Although LaRee and I don’t overtly acknowledge it, it seems we’re in a new phase now, where the canes will be left behind and I will use a walker. So there will be a new phase of grieving. We accepted the way it was, but the deterioration continues.”
LaRee adds, “Now he has to take two naps, not just one. His day is getting shorter and shorter. Medical supplies are filling up our home, diapers, walkers and scooters. The illness is becoming more obvious.”
“When I stand before the Lord and he explains why this was allowed…” Mark hesitates, then starts again. “Some men are guilty of sins of the flesh, and I’m guilty of the sin of pride. If MS is what it takes to root that sin out, so be it. If there’s a blessing in suffering, perhaps that’s it. A prerequisite for Christian conversion is brokenheartedness.
“Too many Christians have bought into the idea that God is a Sugar Daddy. But the fact is that we are to fit into God’s will, not him into ours. If this is what it takes to burn the pride out of me, to make me more like him and less like me, then let it be. Or else I didn’t really mean what I said when I converted. Talk is cheap.
“What about divine healing? I have been healed. I have been forgiven. Before I was disabled I was able-bodied on the outside but I was crippled inside. Now I’m crippled on the outside but Christ abides with me on the inside.
“Today my life is richer, not in spite of the MS, but because of it.”
As Mark concludes his speech applause starts to spread across the room. Then, instead of fading, it builds, as one person after another pushes back his chair and rises. Soon the room is washed with applause, and every single person in the place is on his feet. Everybody except one.
Article originally appeared on Frederica.com (http://www.frederica.com/).
See website for complete article licensing information.
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The Horn of Joy: A Meditation on Eternity and Time, Kairos and Chronos
http://jonathanscorner.com/writing/joy/joy5.html
Bishop K.T. Ware began one lecture/tape by saying that at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy, there is a line that is very easy to overlook: the deacon tells the bishop or his deputy the priest, "It's time to get started." Except that he doesn't say, "It's time to get started," but "It is time for the Lord to act."
He pointed out both that the liturgy is the Lord's work, even if both priest and faithful must participate for it to be valid (he said that the pop etymology of liturgy as "lit-urgy", "the people's work", may be bad etymology but it's good theology). But another point tightly tied to it is the exact Greek word that is translated "time."
There are two words that are both translated time, but their meanings are very different. Translating them both as time is like translating both genuine concern and hypocritical flattery as "politeness" because you are translating into a language that doesn't show the distinction. Perhaps the translators are not to be blamed, but there is something important going on in the original text that is flattened out in English. And when the deacon says "It's time to get started," it does not mean "My watch says 9:00 and that's when people expect us to start," but "This is the decisive moment." In the Gospels, when Jesus' own brothers and sisters failed to grasp who he was just as completely as the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he tells them, "My kairos has not yet come, but your kairos is always here." (Jn 7.6).
Orthodox do not have any kind of monopoly on this distinction, but we do have a distinction between what is called "chronos" and what is called "kairos." Chronos is ordinary if we take a harsh meaning to the word, instead of "everything is as it should be". Chronos at its worst is watching the clock while drudgery goes on and on. If chronos is meaningless time, kairos is meaningful time, dancing the Great Dance at a decisive moment. It is putting the case too strongly to say that the West is all about chronos and Eastern Christianity is all about kairos, but I do not believe it is putting the case too strongly to say that East and West place chronos and kairos differently, and kairos is less the air people breathe in the West than it should be.
I don't think that chronos needs as much explanation in the West; chronos is what a clock measures; the highbrow word for a stopwatch is "chronometer" and not "kairometer". The distinction between kairos and chronos is somewhat like the distinction between I-Thou and I-It relationship. But let me give "ingredients" to kairos, as if it were something cooked up in a recipe.
Chronos
Eternity
Appointed time
Rhythmic circular time with interlocking wheels
Linear unfolding time
Moments when you are absorbed in what you are doing
Decisive moments when something is possible that was impossible a moment before and will be impossible a moment later
Dancing the serendipitous Great Dance
Total presence
But kairos is not something cooked up in a recipe; chronos may be achievable that way, but kairos is a graced gift of God.
We Might All Be Alcoholics
A recovering alcoholic will tell you that alcoholism is Hell on earth. He would say that it is the worst suffering on earth, or that it is the kind of thing you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.
And the point that healing and restoration begins is exquisitely painful. An alcoholic has a massive screen of denial that defeats reasoning. The only semi-effective way to defeat that denial is by a massive dose of even more painful reality that can break down that screen, some of the time. (An intervention.)
If alcoholism is Hell, why don't alcoholics step out of it? Some people in much less pain find out what they need to do to stop the pain and leave. They take off a pair of shoes that is too tight, or ask for an ambulance to treat their broken arm (and I believe someone who's been through both experiences would say that alcoholism is a much deeper kind of pain than a broken arm).
Surely alcoholics must have a sense that something is wrong--and that's what they're trying to evade. That's what half an alcoholic's energy goes into evading, because stopping and saying "I'm an alcoholic." is the greatest terror an alcoholic can jump into. It may be a greater fear than the fear of death--or it is the fear of the death, a step into where nothing is guaranteed.
And that is where to become Orthodox might as well be recognizing you are an alcoholic. Not, perhaps, that every Orthodox has a problem with alcohol, but we all have a problem, a spiritual disease called sin that is not a crime, but is infinitely worse than mere criminality. And the experience an alcoholic says saying, "My name's Ashley, and I'm an alcoholic," for the first time, is foundational to Orthodox religion. "Here is trustworthy saying that deserves acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first."
There is a book, I have been told, among alcoholics called Not-God, because part of dealing with the cancer of alcoholism, as difficult as recognizing a terrible problem with alcohol, is recognizing that you have been trying to be God and not only are you not God, but your playing God has caused almost untold troubles.
Repentance is the most terrifying experience an Orthodox or an alcoholic can experience because when God really confronts you, he doesn't just say "Give me a little bit." He says, "Give me everything," and demands an unconditional surrender that you write a blank check. This is as terrifying as the fear of death--or perhaps it is the fear of death, because everything we are holding dear, and especially the one thing we hold most dear, must be absolutely surrendered to--the Great Physician never tells us what, because then it would not be the surrender we need. We are simply told, "Write a blank check to me. Now."
How does this square with becoming a little Christ?
So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any incentive of love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
The two paragraphs, as I have broken up Phil 2:1-11 (RSV), are complementary. What the last paragraph says is that the equal Son of God emptied himself and kept on emptying himself further and suffering further until there is nothing left to give. And this is not a sinner, a mere creature, but the spotless and sinless Son of God showing what it means to be divine. It is not in Heaven that Christ shows the full force of divinity, but by emptying himself, willingly, to death on a cross and a descent into the realm of the dead. That is the moment when death itself began to work backwards--and humbling and emptying ourselves before God is the sigil of being exalted and filled with God's goodness. But the other side of the coin is that if we think we can become divine, or even be human, while not being emptied, we are asking to be above Christ and expecting to have something that is utterly incoherent.
When we recognize that we are not God, then we become christs. When we empty ourselves, and let go of that one thing we are most afraid of giving to God, then we discover, along with the recovering alcoholic, that what we were most afraid to give up was a piece of Hell. We discover, with the alcoholic, that what we were fighting God about, and offering him consolation prizes in place of, was not something God needed, but something we needed to be freed from.
This emptying, this blank check and unconditional surrender, is what makes divinization possible. I was tempted in writing this to say that it is the ultimate kairos, but that's exaggerating: the ultimate kairos is the Eucharist, but if we refuse this kairos, we befoul what we could experience in the Eucharist. If we are talking about a decisive moment that is not our saying "I want to make myself holier" so much as us hearing God say "You need to listen to me
NOW," then however painful it may be it is a step into kairos and a step further into kairos. And only after the surrender do we discover that what we were fighting against was an opportunity to step one step further into Heaven. Repentance is appointed time. Repentance is the decisive moment, one we enter into again. Repentance is simultaneously death and transfiguration, the death that is transfiguration and the transfiguration that recapitulates death. Repentance is eternity breaking into time. Repentance is one eternal moment, and the moment we cycle back to, and the steps of climbing into Heaven. Repentance is being pulled out of the mud and painfully scrubbed clean. Repentance is fighting your way into the Great Peace. Repentance is the moment when we step out of unreality and unreal time into reality and the deepest time. Repentance is not the only moment in kairos, but it is among the most powerful and the most deeply transforming, decisive moments that appointed kairos has to offer.
Miscellanea
I do not have time to write, and perhaps you do not have time to read, separate sections about some things I will briefly summarize:
Life neither begins at 18 nor ends at 30. Every age is to be part of a kaleidoscope. Contrary to popular opinion in America, not only is it not a sin to grow old, but each age has its own beauty, like the seasons in turn and like the colors in a kaleidoscope. And that is why I do not guiltily talk about having "hit 30" any more than I would guiltily talk about having "hit 18" or "hit 5", because in the end feeling guilty about approaching a ripe age is as strange as feeling guilty about being born: not that there is anything wrong with being a child in the womb, but the purpose of that special age is not to remain perennially a in the womb to grow in maturity and stature until our life is complete and God, who has numbered the hairs on our heads and without whom not even a sparrow can die, come to the thing we fear in age and discover that this, "death", is not the end of a Christian's life but the portal to the fulness of Heaven where we will see in full what we can now merely glimpse.
When we reach Heaven or Hell, they will have reached back so completely that our whole lives will have been the beginning of Heaven or the beginning of Hell.
People make a dichotomy between linear and cyclical time. The two can be combined in spiral (or maybe helical) time, and the movement of time forwards in growth combined with the liturgical cycles makes a rhythmic but never-repeating helix or spiral. (If that is embedded in what Maximus Confessor said about linear, circular, and spiral motion.)
One step away from saying that time is a line is saying that time is a pole on which a living vine grows, making a richer kind of connection than a materialist would see. That is a little bit of why we are contemporaries of Christ.
GLORY TO GOD FOR
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