Roger Bennett
Building Committee Chair

It was is if he had proposed to abolish Social Security – the famous “third rail of politics.” 19,000+ people viewed the blog, and many of them intended to use the comboxes to shout down Fr. Andrew or convert him (back) to a preference for cotton candy when he’s glimpsed the King’s Great Banquet.  Mindful of the proverb about dogs returning to vomit, he declined.

I can’t help but view his Tuesday blog as a further response of sorts.

I spent roughly 30 years in some variant of Evangelicalism before I became equivocally Evangelical/Calvinist (it wasn’t clear to me that the two were really compatible because of Evangelicalism’s dominant bad eschatology, Dispensationalism, which Calvinists traditionally rejected, but I still felt kinship with Evangelicals).

20 years later still, I left that all – Evangelicalism and Calvinism – for Orthodoxy, still feeling that millions of Evangelicals just needed to hear Orthodoxy to heed it and embrace it. To me, Orthodoxy felt like the fulfillment of nearly 50 years of errant Christian life, and I assumed that others would feel the same.

Nearly 15 more years has left me doubting that. I’m afraid, for reasons I still haven’t deciphered, that most Evangelicals are content to wallow with the pigs and eat the pigs’ leftovers (conformity to, and slavish imitation of, it, mainstream culture, including the Evangelical rapper’s imitation, no doubt, of some mainstream rapper in style if not in substance).

Father Andrew is ever so much nicer and more thorough that I. I commend to you the video and his 2 (or is it 3?) responses. It may be important to read because this is the kind of spiritual nonsense which dominates North America’s faux-Christian culture, at least in the imaginations of the mainstream press. (I’ve never been “mainstream” Protestant, so I cannot say if it’s sounder, nor do I know whether, although ignored by the press, its totals exceed those of Evangelicals.)

If you are keenly interested, some guy blogging as “Tipsy Teetotaler,” with a writing style suspiciously like my own, but less inhibited, has also commented on this stuff. I’ll leave you to Google him if you like.

Compline will be served at 5:30 pm, instead of Vespers, and confession will follow.

Roberts Rules of Order are designed to let the deliberate (adj.) majority have its will while allowing a minority to force the majority to deliberate (v.). We deliberated for nearly 3 hours, with me chairing. The consensus strongly seems to be that the design is wonderful, and we want to build it.

Now a few more financial hurdles!

It seems to me as I digest the lessons of the past few months, and of the meeting today, that banks don’t know quite what to make of a parish that has always risen to every financial challenge — but then has settled into a fairly low level of routine giving. For that matter, many members of the parish don’t know that to make of that, either.

If I’m right about that, our biggest financial challenge may be increasing general fund giving above our immediate needs if only to prove ourselves creditworthy.

Stay tuned. But also, if you wish, feed back your thoughts.

Roger Bennett

That much came as no surprise. What did come as a surprise is the consequence of that: standing alone, the Divine Liturgy could lead one to the heresy of monphysitism, because it came before the two natures of Christ were affirmed (as always, in response to the threat of a heresy to the contrary) at the Council of Chalcedon.

Thus, it is not only beneficial, but arguably is necessary for spiritual health, for an Orthodox Christian to participate in Matins and Vespers, which are post-Chalcedonian, and to read the Gospels during the week rather than to rely on Divine Liturgies alone for spiritual formation.

(Teacher and Savior)

2. This was from Clark Carlton rather than Fr. PHR. Carlton happened to land on Chalcedon as well (Chalcedon marks a rift between what today are called “Eastern Orthodox” and what are called “Oriental Orthodox”).

What the speaker noted is that the rift was not so much a disagreement (how could the folks who would become “Oriental Orthodox” disagree with the modest, apophatic Orthodox view that the two natures of Christ are not to be thought of  as confused, changeable, divisible, or separable?) as a refusal of the future Eastern Orthodox to adopt a particular affirmative, cataphatic definition of the two natures rather than a more open-ended definition-by-exclusion.

(Theological Language, Ecumenical Dialogue, and Evangelism: Part III)

3. Clark Carlton again audaciously (I thought) sets out to explain the theology of St. Gregory Palamas “in twelve minutes or less.” I hope I’m not deluded, but I thought he did a wonderful job, which I would hesitantly but evocatively (I hope) summarize in SAT terms: essence/transcendence = energies/immanence. (I confess to having had some instruction in the basic affirmation in the West that God is both transcendent and immanent.)

In other words, the theology of St. Gregory is an attempt to maintain that God the Holy Trinity is both transcendant (in His essence) and immanent (in His energies); that the experience of God’s glory is a real experience of God(‘s energies); and that humans can actually become “partakers of the divine nature” (i.e., energies, not essence; see I Peter). A refusal to acknowledge that God’s energies are the immanent presence of God leaves us essentially alone in the universe, theorizing about God, but never experiencing Him. It effectively denies the reality of God’s immanence. It’s the result of doing theology in a classroom rather than in prayer.

I guess I’d been over-complexifying it.

(Palamism Explained in Twelve Minutes or Less)

Roger Bennett

The text was the Gospel for today’s Liturgy, Mark 8:34-9:1, ”Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.”

What I find in this undertaking is self-will, my rebellious soul that wants its own way.  My inner life is akin to a 2,500 pound Spanish fighting bull, and no one is about to ride such a ‘self’ or to lead it …
My cross is to embrace with the love of the Lord Jesus all whosurround me in life.  Most especially my cross is those who ‘wave red flags’ to provoke the ‘fighting bull’ in me.  God brings into our lives those who aggravate, irritate and inflame our passions to provide opportunities for suffering love.  We do not need to seek in strange places for suffering.  He gives them in the accidents of our residence, financial agreements, social contacts, professional relationships, spiritual fellowships and parish life.
The Lord Jesus shapes each cross to develop the commitment of those He loves, so that they will die to their desires and exhibit His will through words and deeds ….

A few added thoughts:

• Who waves red flags at your “raging bull”?
• What would “suffering love” look like with them?
• Will the world scorn us as “enablers” for our “suffering love”?
• Is the world’s scorn itself a red flag?

His All-Holiness, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, informed the Diocesan Chancery, on Tuesday, I believe, that  His Eminence, Archbishop Demetrios was appointed Locum Tenens for the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, effective  immediately. In other words, His Eminence is effectively our Bishop until a new Bishop is chosen, and will be commemorated as such in our litanies and otherwise.

Pray for our reposed Metropolitan, but also for the Diocese in this time of transition.