R306: TO BE COME ORTHODOX YOU HAVE TO MAKE A PARADIGM-SHIFT

It takes some Orthodox years or decades to realize that to become Orthodox, it is necessary to make a paradigm-shift. (For paradigms, CLICK HERE.) This is true whether you come from a Western Christian (Latin or Protestant) background or from some other religion or none. The books you may be given given to read may make Orthodoxy look like Papalism Lite ("seven sacraments" but no pope, married priests, etc.")--which may be more attractive if you are coming from the Latin persuasion; or less attractive if you are coming from the antitraditionalist left wing of Christianity--Evangelicals, etc. But to keep trying to retain what you have and simply build on it is as as much of a delusion as trying to mix oil with water: You'll see the oil and not the water constituting the larger and basic mass. The totality will never add up to a coherent substance. You won't be happy if you like coherence and consistency.

The foregoing will not be welcome news (i) to those think that all religions "are saying the same thing," though maybe one will be saying it better or more accommodatingly than another; or (ii) to those who think that different forms of Christianity may not be saying the same thing, but all have the same axiomatic framework (with variants of ethos) and with a little subtracting here and adding there, one can make the shift with no great intellectual or practical effort--after all we read the same Bible don't we? But our paradigms are different, and the axioms of one's paradigm or thought word fence in what a term can say and they fence out what a term cannot say; so agreement on words is not agreement of what the words mean. Far from it.

On (i): The Orthodox don't "say" Western Christian better than Western bodies do; and many Western bodies are going concerns who can offer you Western Christianity with a gloss of traditionality or Papalism Lite if that is what you want) a lot better than American Orthodoxy can, does, or will!

On (ii): Let's see if we read the same Bible,. More specifically, let's see if your Bible says the same thing as our Greek New Testament . . . and indeed our Greek Old Testament (whose text is over a millennium older that the Massoretic Hebrew text). Bilingual Hebrew-and-Greek-speaking Jews translated the Hebrew Bible in the third century before Christ; and the Dead Sea scrolls discovered some decades ago agree more with the Greek than with the Massoretic Hebrew text where the text is available in the Scrolls. Let's look a sample from each of the Testaments to see what they really say:

Consider Gen. 1:26: The Greek clearly says that God created Adam ("humanity") according to the Icon (or Image or Likeness) of God and according to the Assimilation. Note (a) that "assimilation" is homoíōsis, derived from the causative verb omoioûn ("cause to be like, liken, assimilate") exactly the way assimilation is derived from the verb assimilate in English. The result is a homoíōsis is a homoíōma "likeness." Greek had several other words in use for "likeness, image," some found in the New Testament. (b) English "image and likeness" is redundant and makes no sense. Both Hebrew and Greek have two different prepositional phrases in Greek, though they are structured different in the different languages' readings of the Gen. 1:26. Further, Greek has the preposition for "according to." "In the image" is a bit wide of the mark.

Consider Phlp. 2:13: "For it is God [Who is] energizing in you all both to will and to energize for the sake of [His] being well pleased." The Apostle Paul used energy terminology 26 times. We know what he meant. Aristotle tells us that reality consists of pairings of dynámeis (plural of dýnamis, whose meaning in this context is a "potential," "capacity," or faculty"). Human essence had two dynámeis that distinguished them from animals; these could not be lost without humans' becoming animals. According to St. John of Damaskós, the two distinguishing dynámeis were reason (lógos) and freechoice.

Consider also John 1:(1,)3: Everyone who spoke Greek in the centuries immediately before and after the Birth of Christ knew Who the LOGOS-Creator was: the Reason of God. St. Paul called him the SOPHIA or Wisdom of God in 1 Cor. 1:24. (Wisdom is practical reason; the Cathedral in Constantinople was named for Christ the Holy Wisdom of God.). Philo the Jew (Jesus's contemporary knew this. Every non-atheist thinker in Greek regarded the Creator as God's Reason and Wisdom--even the atheistic Stoics used the concept. Students of the subject think that St. John the Theologian and Evangelist had providentially read Philo.

When Jesus and His holy Apostles created the new religion that we call Christianity, they took Hebrew respect for created matter to convey spiritual Grace and Hebrew respect for the revelatory function of time as the substance or matter of the new religion; but they rejected the will-based juridicalism or legalism of the Hebrews as the form--what gave meaning to the material. Some forms of Christianity mirror-image this, taking the Hellenistic Gnostic rejection of the rôle of matter to convey Grace and of time to serve a revelatory function, while retain Hebrew will and law as the formative part of their Christianity. Grace is no longer something--it is the virtual righteousness that God "imputes" to those who are actually still sinners! It is possible to read Scripture any way you wish!

Every person thinking in Greek in the centuries immediately preceding or following the Birth of Christ knew that Salvation was the Assimilation to God. For Christians, It got lost at the Fall and gets recovered in Baptism. Everyone accepted that the Reason and Wisdom of God created "every single thing that has been made," something that explains why the cosmos is logikós ("intelligible"). The energetic nature of creation (it was dark energy before light was created on the fourth "day"; note that the universe is still 96% dark energy and dark matter, though astrophysicist don't agree on the exact proportions of each. Great Vasil said that the universe evolves from simpler to more complex. The first chapter of Hebrews mentions that the Creator constantly "upholds" creation; He re-creates it at each instant to keep it from falling back into nothingness. Similarly revelation occurs through time. The few dogmas are potentials, empty until activated by doctrines (teachings) that build on prior teachings across the ages. By building on the past, the entirely remains consistent with itself.

MANTRA CHRISTIANITY

To suppose that one can move from a sloganizing (e.g. "Jesus died to save

EGO") Christianity concentrating on personality problems to doctrinal Orthodoxy without undergoing a paradigm-shift is a cognitive mirage. Who Jesus was and is makes a difference in what the slogan means; how His dying could redound to my credit is a question that, if not explained, evacuates the statement of meaning--and utility. To suppose that one can move to Orthodoxy (i) from a paradigm that does not recognize the energy terminology of St. Paul (and St. James) in the New Testament or (ii) from a non-ontological concentration on the Life-giving Cross that makes the ontological Incarnation of God the Son and His fleshly Resurrection incidental . . . is as deceptive a mirage as one might imagine.

This is a small but telling sample of dozens of examples to show that (a) we are not "reading the same Bible" and that (b) when we say the same things, "we are not saying the same things."

     There is a significant difference between a mindset (phrónēma) and a mind-fix, i.e. an endocentric inability to look outside of one's cognitive box to check the merits of another point of view or frame of reference. One is often ignorant of one's presuppositions--which make one's own view, however outrageous (like inheriting another's guilt, or transferring another's merit without become one with the other), true . . . and others' views untrue. How many read newspapers of contrary orientations to achieve a balanced view? How many think they have a simple religion when it is vastly complicated, if they could only see the presuppositions that underpin it? And why does simplicity seem superior to sophistication to them? (Incidentally, the Orthodox view could not be simpler--recovering the Assimilation to God that Adam lost at the Fall, which resulted in the sin-prone state of hamartía--the result of lacking the Assimilation to God--that all humans inherit.)
      Given that all religions claim to be true, entrusting one's entire future to a set of beliefs should be done with some care.   Aside from other criteria of truth, a person that already accepts Christianity might wish to check whether a framework that one favors was invented in (and carrying all the baggage of) the latter Middle Ages or the Renaissance . . . whether it consistent with the thinking of the Greek-speaking Apostles. How does one assess that? One way is to see what St. Paul's 26 uses of energy terminology meant to anyone who wrote in Greek in the centuries preceding or follow our Savior's Birth--what, e.g., the relation of enéryeia to dýnamis was.
    The procedure is not complex. For example, one can ask whether the Apostles could have taught that Grace (uncreated Energy, God's Life, for the Orthodox) was either the "created but supernatural, non-energetic habit of the soul" that the Latins claim or "God's benignity in treating a sinner as virtually righteous," as the Reformers claimed as the result of their late-Mediæval (Ockhamist) will-based theological framework (whose form or interpretation of Christian materials was Semitic, but ultimately more indebted to Islamic Córdova more than to the Hebrews).
     Does it make sense to say that newborns are guilty of Adam's sin; or that the merits of Christ or some Saint can be transferred by an act of will (imputation) to a believer? Does it make sense to insist that faith is volitional? Other beliefs that one might wish to check can be found HERE.

The Orthodox do not believe Adam's guilt can be transferred to newborns; they do not find this in Scripture, and realize that if God imputed one person's guilt to another, He would be the Cause of evil. Likewise, it would be counternatural for Him to impose death to extinguish the natures He had created; He rather let satan (written in lower case) impose death to keep individuals from sinning perpetually. The Orthodox do not find the pagan idea of the soul's immortality by nature (rather than by Grace (the uncreated Energies of God the all-holy Trinity's Life) in Scripture either. We have no trouble with the all-pure Theotokos's (Mother of God's) dying because death is not a punishment from sin; nor did she need a special immaculate conception to live as an all-pure Virgin, since all infants are born sinless. (The Latins are contradictory in maintaining that guilt is inherited by the male line and nevertheless suppose that the Theotókos needed to be exempted from it; perhaps she got it from her Father according to Western teaching.) The second-century apologete (a time when Christians in Rome still spoke Greek) mentions the foregoing points and declared (what the Orthodox believe) that Jesus is the Old Testament YHWH whose name St. Elizabeth in Luke 1:43 couldn't say but, like all Jews, substituted "my Lord." In fact, Jesus in John 8:58 says He is the One Who IS in Exod. 3:14. He appeared in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day; He gave the Commandments at Mt. Sinai; He appeared in the fiery furnace in Daniel's day; etc.

The first two heresies were (i) doubts about Jesus's being fully divine and/or fully human; and and (ii) the Gnostic heresy briefly referred to above. This was something that practically all of the early Christian writers (pre-eminently St. Eirēnaíos) spent many pages lambasting as the great enemy of true Christianity.

In many places in the USA, Orthodoxy is americanizing in the wrong ways. It is good to use the media and take advantages of other American ways to make our Faith known; we can learn from other religions. The same is true of raising funds for our basic needs. It is ungood to change any traditional ways without which the "flavor" or phrónēma ("mindset, outlook, worldview, frame of reference") of holy Orthodoxy gets lost--introducing chairs (for all but the elderly, the pregnant, the infirm and war- wounded), musical instruments, exterior windows in the temple walls (they are traditionally in a lantern tower). But these are nothing compared with the pervasive trend to abandon our distinctive terminology and our distinctive customs.

You cannot build a wooden house on plastic or a skyscraper on sand. The foundation and the structure have got to be compatible. This means that you cannot build Orthodoxy on a non-Orthodox basis. It also means that you have to set out from axioms of the Eastern Orthodox thought world, if you want the foundation and the structure to match and be compatible enough so that the structure won't crumble and fall down. If the foundation is otherdox, the building blocks will have otherdox meanings, however much they may seem to sound Orthodox!
One can perhaps begin with a vague idea of the all-holy Trinity, or even the essentialist Western view (which finds the Unity of the Trinity in His Essence rather than in deriving all being from Father in the Orthodox manner) and move to the Orthodox view of this most essential of all beliefs. But you cannot build on the beliefs about the sinfulfness of newborns, God's going against the natures He created and snuffing out His rational creatures with Death, or many other views that contradict Orthodox views. Orthodoxy cannot be built on such contradicting foundations. You cannot go from a virtual view of unity with God or a virtual view of Christ's fleshly Presence in an ordinance, the Lord's Supper, to Orthodox belief without rejecting those views that stand in such conflict with Orthodoxy. Like adding -3 to +3, contradictions have yield zero. You cannot mix oil and water. And you have to give up one to have the other in a pure form.

Such considerations make a parish consists entirely of new converts problematic. It may be well nigh impossible for it to exhibit the authentic aroma of the Orthodox phrónēma.