"IN A NUTSHELL":  LETTER TO A PASTOR ON
TRULY CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANITY

© 2006 by Orchid Land Publications

20060730

Dear Pastor:

     I found the report today of your sermons to your megacongregation  very encouraging, despite the defection of a thousand members—one fifth of the total.  I think that calling radical views—after all Evangelicals are at the opposite extreme from the most conservative [= tradtionalist] kind of Christian-ity―Orthodoxy, is a catachresis.  Few people seem to know that:

√ St. Vasil the Great accepted (as do the Orthodox) an evolutional creation, revelation, and salvation.  We do not reject time and tradition in religion the way Protestants do.

√ The same goes for accepting materiality (Mysteries—Baptism, palms, wedding ring, the Eucharist, anointing the sick, icon, conjugal sex, etc.; there is no fixed number).

√  A huge difference is the ontic-energetic sense of St. Paul’s that we have embraced 2000 years almost, not the contrary volitonal-juridical senses of the West; cf. http://www.orlapubs.com/AR/R265-X.html.  Since the Creator was God’s Reason (John) or Wisdom (Paul), the kósmos is logikós “intelligible, not amenable to reason.”  Protestants say that the Creator was a Word; hence services are “wordy.”  The eneregy sense of Phlp. 2:13 makes the conflict of Grace (uncreated Energy) and works (synergy of created energy with uncreated Energy) nonsense.  Grace is uncreated Energy or Life; becoming a member of Christ is sharing that Life.

√ For us, worship is not sermons directed not to God but to the people; we sit for sermons but stand or prostrate ourselves for worship, though it is an act of humility and request for forgiveness when each congregant prostrates oneself before each other person present and says “Forgive” on Forgiveness Lordsday at the beginning of the Great Fast.

√  Worship is offering the best part of creation back to the Creator.  We call this a Sacrifice, viz. of the Savior’s Body and Blood (John 6:53-54).

√  If God is not both a changeless/imparticipable Essence and a changeful/participable Energy (Nature), the idea of becoming a partaker of the divine Nature is nonsense, and St. Peter was wrong.  Moreover, a changeless God  makes predestination logically unavoidable. 

      The history of how/why the volitional-juridical paradigm replaced the original ontic-ener­getic paradigm in Western Christianity is laid out on this.

 

                                                                                         in Christ God,

 

PS:  Other webpages on this website discuss Orthodox latreutic customs and moral behaviors.