Journey Into Divine Intimacy

In my experience, some people approach salvation like an  algorithm . They present it as though a person who follows a finite list of well-defined steps can be guaranteed a verdict of "not guilty" on the Day of Judgment. In the tradition of my upbringing, descriptions for some of these steps include "praying the sinner's prayer", "asking Jesus into one's heart", or "making a decision for Christ". I think this approach is not accurate because it reduces salvation to a science. Instead, I think that salvation is an art, probably most like a drama involving several actors. We are going to look at this drama. In this post, we will look at the plot of the drama. And then in the next post, we will see how we may artistically participate. The Exposition God created mankind in the His  image  and  likeness  (Gen. 1:26). But what exactly does that mean? Well, each word has a specific meaning to the Church Fathers: To be created in the...

I had another thought about how to explain my faith to friend and family: by singing. That might seem odd, but it is consistent with an ancient principle principle in which Orthodox believe:  lex orandi lex credendi.  This Latin phrase literally means "the law of prayer is the law of faith". It means "that our rule of worship is nothing other than our rule of belief. Our prayer is shaped by and expresses our theology, just as our theology is illumined and deepened by our prayer." ( http://holycrossoca.org/newslet/0710.html ). Since our hymns are essentially chanted prayers, studying Orthodox hymns are a very good avenue to learn about Orthodoxy. I plan to periodically upload to YouTube videos of my chanting Orthodox Prayers appropriate to the season. Today's music score comes from here: http://ematins.org/AMM/08-12.pdf . I have reproduced below the words to the prayers in today's video. Please worship with me our great God and Savior Jesus Christ who was...

The following is the relevant passage from my chrismation ceremony: Do you believe that the prayers of the Saints work before God for our salvation , and that their relics, glorified through incorruption and miracles, are meet for veneration? This is more of an affirmation than a renunciation, and there is a lot being affirmed in this one sentence. In this post I will focus on the part in bold. Let me first start off by clarifying what Orthodox mean by salvation . If a Protestant uses the word salvation without qualification, the default meaning is an event-in-past-time, i.e. what they refer to as justification . If an Orthodox uses the word salvation without qualifying context, the default meaning is the overall journey starting at  baptism and ending at the judgment seat of Christ. So a fair paraphrase of the bolded part is this: Even if he has fallen asleep in Christ, “the effective fervent prayer of a righteousness man avails much” (James 5:16) toward helping us, the obje...

The following is the relevant passage from my chrismation ceremony: Do you renounce the erroneous  accord of the false Reformed teachers, who do not accept the sacred traditions , do not honor the Saints, and reject prayers on behalf of the departed? Protestants believe in Sola Scriptura . Orthodox believe in a "faith that was once for all delivered" (Jude 3) to the Apostles, that this faith was transmitted both orally and in writing and regardless the mode we are called to "stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter" (2 Thessalonians 2:15), that the Apostles put in a place a practical process for preserving the oral component throughout history ("what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also" 2 Timothy 2:2), but that the power behind the preservation is the promise of Christ: "And I tell you, you are Peter, a...

As I thought where to begin to share the differences between my new faith and my old faith, I had an idea. During my chrismation ceremony, I had to publicly and formally renounce certain beliefs. The specific set of beliefs needing to be renounced depended upon  my background. My specific renunciations were tailored to distancing myself from Reformed beliefs since that was where my previous identity lay. My idea is to write a blog post for each thing that I had to renounce in order to illustrate differences that the Orthodox Church considers significant enough to require formal renunciation. The first renunciation was as follows: Do you renounce the false doctrine that the predestination of man to their salvation, or their rejection, is not in accordance with the Divine foreknowledge of their faith and good works, or of their unbelief and ungodliness, but according to some irresistible destiny? I want to start with this renunciation for a number of reasons: First, thi...

Not surprisingly, after I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, I have been asked a question over and over: "So what is so different?" The person who asks this presupposes that there are substantive differences and expects me to enumerate things that they not only understand to be different but also that they consider significant . I usually disappoint this type of person because many of the differences lie exactly in what we consider to be important. If I give a concrete example of a different belief, they will say that that is a peripheral issue and not essential. But if I try to explain the more abstract concept that many differences have to do with what we assign to the essential and peripheral categories, they cannot follow. For example, I can list that I believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and they (probably unconsciously) believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. However, as soon as I say this, the response is, "But that i...