What Makes Orthodoxy Different?

your blessing father don't run away so quick thank you thank you father well i'd like to thank you father steve and barbara and everybody who invited me and helped to organize the book signing it's such a pleasure to be with you today and to worship with you it's it's a wonderful thing especially after so many shutdowns what a joy and delight and blessing to be together in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit amen what makes orthodoxy different not how is it different but why if someone were to ask you what is the orthodox church you probably have an answer because you've probably been asked that question before you may point to differences between in belief and behavior between us and catholics and protestants but the question is why are we different orthodox christianity is different because of our phronema our mentality our mindset attitude stance there's like a lot of good greek words there's no one good english word that translates the concept of phronima but now before we even get to talking about phronima let's talk about what makes orthodoxy different in feel than these other western churches first of all orthodoxy is consistent it's consistent there's no sense of incongruity and i don't know uh maybe those of you who are a pr who are who are catechumen or perhaps converts to the faith understand what this is but unless you've spent a lot of time outside of orthodoxy you're talking to people who are not orthodox you don't realize in other churches how much there is kind of a disconnect between what is taught and what is done but orthodoxy has no sense of incongruity everything is integrated and interrelated is everything from our piety you see our icons the beautiful icons reflect the teaching of the church the hymnology reflects the teaching of the church our piety our practices everything fits together perfectly we are also consistent across orthodox jurisdiction so there might be a few little well we could say maybe some little differences in practices among the russians or the serbs or the greeks but for the most part what you see in an orthodox church whether it's russian or serbian or japanese is going to be the same we also have the same spirituality across the church whether you're a monk or a priest or deacon or just a regular layperson we all pray the same prayers we have the same services we have the same readings and this again reflects our constancy and our consistency but most of all perhaps is the importance the fact that we are consistent going back in time the orthodox church a hundred years ago looked just like the orthodox church of today the people dressed differently but there were no major differences in the services or the prayers or the thought it was the same a thousand years ago and i have confidence that it will be the same a thousand years from now if we're still around this sameness this consistency creates also a constancy this timeless quality of orthodoxy the church does not change and most orthodox christians don't want it to change and they fight to preserve it this is really what makes us orthodox but where does that come from and again i'm not saying that we have nothing to change or improve upon in the church especially in individual parishes but whatever we have we preserve faithfully not because we are rigid and backwards and simply devoted to empty rituals which is a charge that's often made against us but we want to preserve it because we know that orthodoxy is the fullest expression of the christian faith in the divine liturgy we pray for unity of the faith and we commit ourselves and one another to christ and to this unity this consistency across generations across cultures throughout all the different aspects of church life is what creates this unity of faith and that has to do with franima now if you're a greek american like me you know the word because your parents might have admonished you that's efronima which means behave yourself but the word phronima which is not just an ancient greek word but a biblical word a biblical word is found many places in the new testament including it's used often by saint paul from ema refers to your thought but it is also linked to behavior and this is a very profound thing that we must remember our thoughts lead to certain behaviors and also our behaviors contribute to the way we think so to sort of sketch out the difference between orthodox florima and western freudima i'm going to sketch out some very broad generalities which is always very perilous between the roman catholic church and protestants and ourselves these are broad generality generalities i don't mean to cause offense and obviously i'm not trying to you know create caricatures but there are certain truths in them and so we're while imperfect let's talk a little bit about the difference between the thronima of protestants and the phronium of catholics and ourselves the catholic church right now is in tremendous confusion and disarray and this goes back about 60 years when they had a council called vatican ii and they modernized most people know that this is when they got rid of the latin but it wasn't just the latin they changed their mass completely the old latin mass no longer is practiced by most catholics they've never seen it or they don't follow it they got rid of many of their services many of their practices including fasting on fridays the nuns in the wearing the habits and this sort of a thing the catholic church has changed tremendously in the past thousand years and it continues to change they also have a very wide number of spiritualities just about everyone has heard of the jesuits and the dominicans and the franciscans but did you know that there are 1 000 different orders in the catholic church 1 000 of these different types of orders and what that means is that if you join an order or if you are educated in a particular institution like i teach in the franciscan school of theology they teach the students or if you belong to the order the monks or the nuns or the brothers and the sisters they teach them to think in a particular way based on the writings and the prayers and the spirituality of the founder so i was telling some of my students about some pretty well-known catholic beliefs and they were surprised because they never heard of them and this these are graduate students in theology by the way they never heard of the things i was telling them and they and then they kind of dismissed them they said but we're franciscans okay that doesn't apply to us as though they belong to some other church so there this what this means here is that roman catholics have a wide variety of spiritualities but can you see how this contributes to different manners of thought protestants on the other hand of course emphasize the bible and they shy away from any kind of authority like the church in their churches the pastor teaches whatever he thinks is correct the services are basically the sermon and a few songs that make you feel good some protestants are liturgical like lutherans but evangelical protestants have no liturgy to speak of their church services are basically a theatrical production i don't mean that in a bad way but they focus on a stage there's a band there's music and there's a sermon that's given by the pastor and so much of it depends upon his powers of oratory to move you to inspire you it's more like a performance and the basic foundation of the protestant mind is sola scriptura the scriptures alone and that every person has the ability to interpret the bible however they want so the protestant church and the catholic church even though they're so different they are two sides of the same coin because they have the same mentality the same mode of thinking the same fronima how can they have the same frontiman be so different because their theology and their practices and their conclusions are based on rational deductive human reasoning and this is a development that happened in the middle ages in western europe this never was a part of the early church and that's why we are so different over the centuries western christianity and the east grew increasingly estranged primarily due to language and cultural differences and to the papacy of course the pope's insisted on more and more power but once western europe began to enshrine human reasoning as the highest measure of truth this is when everything changed in the western church and it also enshrined a kind of legalism that also is of course based on deductive reasoning and i'll explain it to you in a moment with one particular example that everybody is familiar with the dominant view of salvation in western christianity is that jesus christ had to die on the cross because the father demanded that somebody pay the price for our sins that concept originated around the year 1000 in western europe and it's based exclusively on deductive human reasoning and legalism this manner of thought is entirely foreign to orthodoxy so our phranima where do we get it from and what does that word fronima really mean besides a manner of thought where do we find it in the bible saint paul said we must not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of our minds this was what the apostles were always teaching and then he continued in the next verse this is in romans 12 he said don't think too highly of yourself but think soberly and when you use the word think it's that word fronima but the it's the verbal form anit deb and then later when he was telling the christians of philippi how they ought to behave toward one another with a spirit of humility and he gave the example of the crucifixion of the lord he said have this in mind amongst yourselves that word in mind is that word phronima think about this remember this that jesus christ though he was equal with the father did not count equality with the father something to be god something to be grasped but he emptied himself and became a servant et cetera so what is it that since we're talking about the scriptures the phronium of the church is rooted in the scriptures why is it that protestants don't have it and catholics don't have it but we do we have the mind of the early church we have the mind of the apostles if we will keep it if we will preserve it if we won't go following western modes of thinking that insist constantly that everything be subject to human reasoning and explanations and definitions when you come to church like you did today when you read your prayers at home you are reinforcing that thronima when you pray along with father steve and father theophrazz de alfanus when you when you sing with the choir all of these things our fasting our prostrations our prayers all of this reinforces our orthodox franima when a catholic theologian is going to write about a certain subject they will read all the modern books on that subject and they will look at the vatican documents that talk about it there's always an orientation toward rome and the decisions of rome a protestant will probably read modern books and also read the bible what do we read we might read some modern orthodox theologians but an orthodox theologian turns first to the fathers of the church and to the scriptures and we all know about the fathers you know this but the question is why is that so important because when i am writing on a particular subject and i am reading saint basil and john chrysostom and athanasius and all these other and more recent ones too like say nicola demos or somebody like that i am reading the same things that the theologians a hundred years before me read and a thousand years before me read we're reading the same scriptures the same fathers we're drinking from the same well and this constantly constantly going back to the ancient sources preserves in orthodox christianity the ancient mind of the church our franima now orthodoxy is not against science or education we just don't believe that we can discover truths about god through human reasoning and the bible agrees with us by the way chris saint paul said that the cross is foolishness jesus did not save us god did not save us through human reasoning this is what saint paul is discussing in first corinthians orthodoxy is not irrational i'm not suggesting that you all throw reason out the window because our prayers call us reason endowed sheep so we are supposed to use our minds but not to discover truths about god orthodoxy is absolutely faithful to apostolic tradition and we are confident that we have preserved the mind of the early church because of the practices that i described to you we don't rely on human thinking we don't rely on the opinions of martin luther or john calvin or rick warren at saddleback church what we rely on is what the apostles taught now sometimes we're criticized oh those are traditions of men no they're not they're traditions from the lord they're not human traditions that we're following here everything came from the lord now i want you to just imagine with me what life was like for those original disciples of the lord just think back about it they were with him for three years yes he took them aside and he taught them things privately and by the way what he told them is not recorded in the bible is it he taught them privately but when they weren't actually being taught they were watching him as he interacted with thousands of people every day people were coming and asking him for help and they were coming to be healed they watched how he interacted how he responded to the pharisees and the sadducees and others in jewish society they watched him for three years and they absorbed his phronema his way of thinking and then when the lord breathed on them and said receive the holy spirit and after pentecost when when they went out to preach the gospel he didn't give them handouts and pamphlets and a bible they went out and preached what the gospel and that's it but they didn't just teach people facts about jesus christ so they could intellectually assent to certain truths through deductive human reasoning they taught the first christians a whole way of life and that's the phronema it's the union of our thoughts with our behavior this is what the apostles conveyed to the first christians and that's the only and only the orthodox church has preserved that because everyone else because the western european um mentality affected both the catholic church and the protestant church which came out of the catholic church so our task as orthodox christians is to continue to learn about our faith to know who we are to believe and to preserve our faith and pass it down we don't need fancy explanations we don't need don't feel like you're required to explain something by means of some logical human reasoning if someone challenges you and they say well where is that written down in some early document the church didn't write everything down for goodness sake most things were taught orally now people say oh this is terrible this means that it's like the the telephone game remember that when you're in school that they try to teach you about not engaging in gossip they had all the children sit in a circle and somebody said something into the ear of the first one they passed it down they called that the telephone game when i was in school oral tradition apostolic tradition is not the telephone game the apostles didn't hear things from jesus once they heard the same things again and again and again and again and they went out and taught them again and again and again there is something that you can rely upon and people were accustomed to oral teaching they didn't have books like we have today they didn't write everything down because actually they had more confidence in what their teacher taught them orally what they heard than what they read and do you know why because all books were hand copied and so if you had a book let's say you knew that matthew wrote a gospel and somebody said here is a copy of matthew's gospel you really had no way of knowing whether or not that was an accurate copy or whether somebody took something out or whether somebody added the copyist added something in people did not rely on writing and so much of the faith was mystery it was a secret and so people simply did not commit these things to writing so for people to insist that we prove to them from some ancient document that this was a practice we don't have to prove to them let them prove to us who have preserved the apostolic teaching that it was not an ancient practice and even saint basil in his writing on the holy spirit said that the early christians the apostles did not write down most things things like the fact that we're facing east to pray that wasn't written down anywhere so many things were never written down well before i conclude i just want to make one more point and that has to do with internet orthodoxy i see i'm losing my audience i'll move it along i'm just teasing just teasing if you have questions about your faith and of course you have a wonderful bookstore you have book signings i know you had one for dr tips you have these wonderful books and assets you have wonderful priests you have a deacon you have teen language you have doctor tips you have many people to get information from i would encourage you to stay off the internet if you want to learn about orthodox christianity because so much of it is full of extremism misinformation and is creating a lot of anxiety and a lot of disruption in the church today it's very hard to know who to listen to anybody can post anything and believe me i know because i try to stay off of these things but occasionally when i've tried to give a simple explanation and people attack me and they don't know anything but they give it gives them an opportunity to feel like they're important to act like they know more than they know and people like to present themselves as experts even though they have really no education and no training theology is something very dangerous talking about god is not something we should take lightly you should if even if you're very you know proud of your faith and you want to defend your faith the internet is not the place to do it because no one has ever been convinced of anything they've never won an argument on the internet that's for sure it's impossible to discuss theology on the internet and you have so many people who can give you good guidance because what's happened now is we have wild extreme views we have ultra liberal people we have ultra conservative orthodox and everybody thinks they're representing true orthodoxy but orthodoxy is really about balance we have people today who say if you get the covet vaccine you're getting the mark of the beast and you're not a good orthodox christian if you get the vaccine other people are saying if you don't get the vaccine you're irresponsible and you're not an orthodox christian and neither of these views expresses the orthodox franima because all of these views are judgmental and harsh and not for us to decide the so many of the people are criticizing the bishops and the priests on the internet again that's not orthodox don't be i'm encouraging you to be faithful about orthodoxy to preserve the faith but don't think that that's your job to be on a crusade to make everybody else understand your point of view don't be so adamant about orthodoxy that you fall into the sin of pride this is also rampant on the internet most of us should not trust ourselves to discern what is true and what is false about what we see so what are we supposed to do remain within the church attend the divine services participate in the sacraments read your bible go to your bible studies and maintain a middle course that's orthodoxy orthodoxy is about balance neither extreme to the left nor extreme to the right but balance because you're not more orthodox by being more extreme if you think by fasting more severely orthodoxy is not about severity it's not about extremism it's about balance and learning to know yourself it's not about following rules orthodoxy is essentially relaxed so as saint paul said do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind renewing our mind is a long process because it involves constant learning introspection repentance renewal commitment but this is how we conform our minds to the mind of christ the epistle reading today began with these words by saint paul god who said let light shine out of darkness who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of god in the face of christ but we have this treasure in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to god and not to us so saint paul was speaking there about the apostles and their witness but it's a wonderful example for us and we are also called to witness we too are treasures in earth and vessels all things are possible through god through our transformation by the power of the holy spirit our purpose is to acquire the mind of christ the franima of the church not just going through the motions not believing that it's enough to just come to church and you know do these outward things but our attitude must change so we may conform ourselves to christ this is why saint paul said imitate me as i imitate christ let us all seek to conform ourselves to christ with humility by acquiring his thronima and dedicate ourselves to following him and glorifying him together with his eternal father and the all-holy and good and life-giving spirit now and ever and unto the ages of ages amen

Channel: Saint Paul's Greek Orthodox Church

Views: 11,675

Keywords: greekorthodox, christianorthodox, easternorthodox, divineliturgy, orthodoxchurchservices, yt:cc=on

Id: XlDkac-dlgs

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021