Editorial
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The Phoney War
(August 2009)
Humans of diametrically opposed views often have a vested interest in conflict. In this the "enemy" is portrayed as having a position that once vanquished will lead to the inevitable triumph of one's own position. Propaganda, mindless rhetoric, misrepresentation, "ad hominem" attacks and vituperation masquerade as "reasonableness." Once a public audience has been mesmerised by the passion and the personalities the rest is sheer theatre but the loss in the end is truth itself. This degenerative process can be seen in the long standing battles between such anti-theists as Richard Dawkins and the so-called Creationists lined up in the face off against him. God help anyone who spoils the party by stepping in the ring and declaring both parties as perpetuating a phoney war. Well, Orthodoxy wants to spoil this party. It wants to say to BOTH sides:- "You are BOTH being irrational. You are both held captive by ignorance and your passions. By not listening to each other and considering other views you fatally undermine your own arguments and truth is the casualty.
Orthodoxy's position on the relationship between faith and science is best answered by the statement that both disciplines answer different but complementary questions and validate their answers in different ways. So, the scientist is concerned with empirically verifiable phenomena and falsifiable theories that account for these according to natural laws. Faith addresses ultimate questions of existence, "why am I here?" - "what is my purpose?" - "how am I to relate to others, to God?" Understood in these terms there can NEVER be any conflict between faith and science. The war between them is truly phoney.
In July the Orthodox Fellowship Fellowship of St. John the Baptist staged a Conference on Orthodoxy and Creation / Evolution. All of the speakers were Orthodox; two were scientists, another a mathematician, another a philosopher and another a psychotherapist. All spoke lucidly of the way in which both faith and science had enriched their lives. They showed no signs of schizoid division of interests or bruising from conflicts external or internal. They showed the truth of the ancient Orthodox Christian dictum that all truth is unitary because God is both Truth and the Source of Truth wherever it may be found. How refreshing to be at peace with the world and oneself. How sad to be locked in a pointless conflict that has no chance of resolution.
FOR FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF CREATION, EVOLUTION AND ORTHODOX THEOLOGY, LISTEN TO THESE LECTURES ONLINE:-
AUDIO FILES
Revd. Fr. Dr. Christopher Knight
Professor George Theokritoff
Very Revd. Archimandrite Kyril Jenner
Professor Richard Swinburne
Wendy Robinson
Orthodoxy and the
Enlightenment
(June 2009)
How do Orthodox
assess the so-called "Age of Reason," that period of heady optimism
between the Restoration of the Monarchy in England in 1660 and the
French Revolution of 1789? It was in this period that the seed of
humanism, sown in the Renaissance and germinating in the Protestant
Reformation finally came to full flower in what is today called the
"Enlightenment."
"Enlightenment" suggests the emergence of humanity from the darkness of
a preceding age. Already the anti-Christian, secular agenda of the Age
of Reason becomes clear. It is in this time that the adjective
"medieval" becomes a term of abuse. It is in this time that the natural
science comes to regard theology as a straight-jacket from which it will
gladly rid itself. The new merchant class will embrace Non-Conformity as
a strike for freedom against the established Anglican country class of
inherited wealth and prestige. The Industrial Revolution will generate
an unchurched class and drive Britain towards a glorious Empire in which
Anglicanism will redefine itself as a denomination riding on the back of
colonialism. Much of this, however, is for later. The roots of the
Enlightenment are in neither machinery nor capital but in a secular
philosophy which will replace what remains of Orthodoxy in the West.
The heroes of this age are Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke. Both are
believers but not in the Orthodox Christian sense of that word. They
believe in the natural law of creation and the reasonableness of
Christian morality, but not in miracles, revelation, resurrection,
salvation, regeneration and the sacraments of the Church. They are
crypto- (if not actual) deists. Hand in hand with the Whigs in politics,
this new intelligentsia lays the foundations of a movement which will
sweep across much of Europe. Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau seize on the
new thinking to widen the breach between a compromised French Church and
a disenfranchised peasant class which they, like all good bourgeoisie
then and since, manipulate to seize power themselves. On the Continent
and starting in France, the anti-Christian bias of this movement towards
"reasonableness," paradoxically, generates the irrational excesses of
Revolution.
Mercifully, Great Britain is saved from the violence of this Age of
Revolution but its Christian culture will remain stifled by this watered
down "rational" moralism for a century or more. Only with Wesley and the
Methodists will the English working class be reached for Christ, but on
the basis of the heart rather than the mind. Here will start the
Evangelical Revival. In the meantime, some Anglican Churchmen such as
Berkeley and Butler will valiantly attempt to halt the slide towards
Deism which, in the Spirit of the Age, preaches a rational, cool and
distant god. He it is who makes laws and simply sits in heaven doing
nothing while the real work is done by reasonable men who obey both His
will and the natural law and have everyone’s best interests at heart.
How comforting! How Establishment!
In truth, however, the real end of the Age of Reason comes with the
French Revolution whose bloody excesses remind all of Europe that the
preachers of the new rationality can be just as cruel and oppressive as
their aristocratic predecessors. David Hume completes the demolition of
this confidence in Reason by showing how tentative all our approaches to
the natural world and truth can be. By emphasising the need for evidence
without presuppositions of any kind, he helps to usher in a new
confidence, not in Reason as such, but in the rise of Science.
So much for the historical survey. But how does the Orthodox Church
react to all of this? We have no or little evidence from the period
itself. The Mediterranean Orthodox World was cut off from the West being
incarcerated under Ottoman Islamic rule. The Russian Church was too busy
dealing with a Tsar in Peter (the so-called) "Great," who seemed to
spend much of his time aping western ways. Significant Orthodox
responses only emerge retrospectively and then, mainly, in relation to
the legacy of the Enlightenment for western churches down to this day.
It is this legacy that informs how we Orthodox must make our mark now.
Orthodoxy lies way distant from the Enlightenment because its approach
to the human mind is so radically different. We do not believe that the
human mind is so pure that the exercise of unaided reason will
inexorably lead to certain self-evident truths about God and humanity,
or simply, just humanity. We cannot even tread part of the way with
David Hume because it must remain a sorry little faith that only relies
on evidence.
We might be tempted perhaps to join with Protestants in our emphasis on
revelation rather than reason or evidence; but no, our understanding of
revelation and evidence is of quite a different character. If a
Protestant Christian cannot accept revelation as God’s steamroller
grinding into history and flattening everything before it, he must
eventually side with the rationalists and have done with such debased
notions of God‘s action. This is, indeed, what many Protestants have
done as their Calvinism has collapsed under the weight of modernity. We
cannot even side with what we may call the "heart-Christians," the
Methodists, Pentecostals and Charismatics. They would make of
Christianity a "warm glow" and little else, reducing it as surely as the
Quakers did before into pious platitudes and social activism. Orthodoxy
is bound to regard all western reform movements as well intentioned but
essentially suspect until a more radical analysis of the problems of the
western Christianity is undertaken.
One good place to start is the relationship between the mind and the
heart. It was the medieval scholastics led by the Dominicans who had
first begun the grand enterprise of Reason, namely, to discern and
confirm the great purposes of God using the faculties of the human mind.
Although Protestants rebelled against this, many Reformed Churches
eventually substituted their own scholasticism of the mind. The
Enlightenment was the inevitable anti-Christian resolution of this
trend. Developing in a parallel fashion, both before and after the
Reformation, the religion of the heart was propagated by the Rhineland
mystics, the Spiritual Franciscans, the Anabaptists, the Quakers, the
Methodists and the Pentecostals. However, these two tendencies in the
West, the mind and the heart, remained quite distinct. Sometimes, open
warfare broke out between them, but each, essentially had its own
separate domain, method and spirituality and each was often defined
against rather than for the other.
Enter now Orthodoxy, a quite different idea, or one should say, a
different ascetical practice, now largely forgotten in the West. In the
highest work of Man, prayer, the mind descends into the heart. There,
the mind remains in tact, still active and functioning; but in the heart
it listens to a Song wider and deeper than its own reasoning, the
murmuring of the Holy Spirit who reveals the Living Word, Christ-God,
whom it must worship before it understands. However, having met Christ
in the heart and having battled against all the demons that would seek
to dethrone His just and gentle rule, the mind resurfaces to the active
realm to understand the blessing it has received. This understanding
combines all that is good and noble in the human and natural sciences,
not in an "easy" humanism that would sell its Christianity for
acceptance by the world, but in a new synthesis, the transfiguration of
all that is human by the Word and Power of God.
In this synthesis of Holy Orthodoxy there are no battles between Faith
and Reason, between Heart and Mind, between Religion and Science,
between the individual and the community. All are one in God and this
unity extends from humanity to the whole Cosmos.
Let us recall then that the source of this true Enlightenment is in the
meeting between the mind in the heart and God. This Enlightenment is not
simply thinking about God or feeling His Presence. It is a struggle with
and for God begun in baptism and completed only on the Last Day when the
Kingdom of God and the Cosmos will be utterly and indistinguishably
joined together in Love. In the Love of God, the mind and the heart are
already one. Orthodoxy has no need of any extra added Enlightenment. It
is Enlightenment itself. Introduce Orthodoxy to the West and the old
destructive so-called "Enlightenment" will just shrivel. Soon may that
day come!
Fr Gregory
Frankenstein or Christ? (May 2009)
The story of
Frankenstein touches something deep inside us.
The longing for immortality so cruelly expressed in this
enlivened cadaver and in all the other failed human resurrections from
Tutankhamen to Lenin persists.
The tragic aspect concerns what we know of all such human
attempts at immortality from cryogenic freezing to elixirs of life, from
transhuman cyborgs to Frankenstein zombies: they are all doomed to fail.
Yet humans still strive to make themselves immortal and each
fatal setback does not seem to put them off.
What they and we resist is the notion that THIS life does not
bear within it any seed of immortality, either accessible by science or
religious experience. This
life always has limits from life spans to the distant but nonetheless
finite trajectory of the universe.
All turns to dust in the end.
We still of course labour and exult in the wonder of this
creation for all that, and rightly so.
A creation with limits still has inestimable value and our place
and calling within it reflects that.
In Christian terms though this creation is dying and any attempt
at amelioration is conditioned by that perspective.
If then we attempt to build a human centred utopia from the raw
materials of this world we shall only see corruption.
This is the inexorable logic of the Frankenstein myth.
Eternal life cannot be moulded from the stench of human
corruption. Immortality is
from God or it is from nowhere.
Of course this is
the point where Christians part company with humanistic fellow
travelling idealists of all sorts.
On this we insist that the resurrection of Christ is our ONLY
grounds for hope in eternal life; His, that is God’s, victory over death
which He has imparted to our humanity in the Incarnation and
sacramentally through Holy Baptism and the Eucharist.
As we die to ourselves in His death, his resurrection life breaks
through into our own. As we
drown the old Adam in the waters of baptism so the Risen Christ is
manifest in our members within the Church, the Body of Christ, (no
Frankenstein body here!). As
we eat of the Body of Christ and drink of his Blood in Holy Communion we
taste of the goodness of the Lord in the Food of Immortality.
As we embrace Christ in His embrace, as we drink freely of the
Spirit outpoured for us we find, as it were, a fount of living water
bubbling up inside of us to eternal life.
As we die to ourselves we are born again (or from above) to a
life in God that has smashed death and rendered it senseless.
As we surrender this creation to God we receive in its stead a
New Creation where the waters of God’s regenerative and healing Love
remake and renew all things.
So Frankenstein or Christ? No contest.
World in Stress (March 2009)
Amongst all the problems that beset us; global warming, international terrorism, global recession, gross inequalities of wealth distribution, there is one crucial factor that is driving all of this: the world is in stress. There are simply too many of us trying to extract more and more from less and less seemingly regardless of the consequences. This is a recipe for disaster, or, if you like, the imminence of a self-correcting mechanism in which billions will die through this century.
This is not scare mongering but rather the calm prediction of James Lovelock, the scientist who has probably done the most to try and wake a heedless world to the coming disaster. Here is his comment in a recent article in the New Scientist magazine, "How to Survive the Coming Century."
"Humans are in a pretty difficult position and I don't think they are clever enough to handle what's ahead. I think they'll survive as a species all right, but the cull during this century is going to be huge," he says. "The number remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less."
The global recession we are now facing probably presents us with a final and unique moment of grace. Uninhibited growth and the associated despoiling of our environment and biodiversity has a chance now to be arrested. We have a final chance to de-stress the world and ourselves by reigning in our appetites, distributing our resources more fairly and going all out for sustainable development. In short, in Orthodox terms, we need to apply the principles of the Great Fast of Lent to the whole world. Such geo-political asceticism will not come about without brave leadership and sacrifice. Will this world be resurrected or are we already in a freefall into a no-exit Hades? I don't know. May the Lord have mercy on us all!
There Probably is no Polly Toynbee
(February 2009)
The British Humanist's Association's Atheist Bus Campaign has really amused me on two counts. First there is the zero effectiveness for atheism it will CERTAINLY have on anyone who is bored enough to read it and even think about what it says. The amusing part is that these people actually think that it WILL have an effect. The funniest and second part though is the English-ness of it all. Double decked reds bedecked with with "probablies" galore, nothing too frightening, just gentle musing ... "on the one hand this on the other hand the other." It is the sort of thing liberal Protestant preachers indulge in every Sunday morning. If this is what persecution amounts to or if this is the measure of Polly Toynbee's assault on the monstrous edifice of religion then we have nothing to fear.
Of course, it does provoke an interesting issue in my mind. You see, I have never met Polly Toynbee. I know that there are images on the television purporting to be her; I know that there are articles in the Grauniad going back many years apparently written by her ... but come on, we all know that the moon landing was faked. Until then I feel the vehemence of her breath down the back of my neck, until I can personally examine her DNA test results, I will not believe. But that's rather the point isn't it Polly? You really won't know until you have met Him. I would tighten that blindfold if I were you and stuff more cotton wool in your ears. You are going to need them.
What Price Freedom? (January 2009)
Benjamin Franklin said it all really yet we never seem to learn the lessons of our history. We get so dazed by terror that, immobilised, we sign up to anything. In Britain it's surveillance, routine hacking by government agencies into private communications, identity cards and the whole apparatus of a nanny state legislating what we can say, do, eat, ... no religion has ever come close to this totalitarianism. Over-reacting? I don't think so. I remember what it was like being a teenager in the 60's. If then the sky was the limit now we can barely see through the small chinks of light in our box today.
St. Augustine famously said: "love God and do what you like." We declare that the service of God is perfect freedom. Serving the State seems increasingly to feel like perfect bondage. How did we come to this sorry state of affairs? Actually I think it started when the west started to lose its faith. For centuries it had been guided by the Ruler of all to whom every earthly sovereign was subject. Today, earthly sovereigns are subject to no one. They and their henchmen make the rules, they hold the keys. They and they alone must be heard in the public square and those who salute the flag rise quickly to the top of the pile.
In order to reverse this dangerous decline of freedom and joy in life believers need to become dissenters again. The State is doing its best right now to woo the voluntary sector into helping it address our manifold social problems. It's about time we reminded the Establishment that there is a price to pay for our cooperation. Love God, fear the people.
