Quote:
I've even been told by an archbishop that the only reason we have churches at all is to receive the mysteries, flawed as churches must be.
Here are snippets of that email conversation. This was some time ago, when I was first converting. This email was perhaps for me a turning point. The words are very relevant to this conversation (sorry for hijacking your thread, X...)
I said: I have always said that Grace is God's reaching out to mankind while religion is mankind's reach for God, and that religion is therefore inherently flawed.
He responded:
Bravo! A perfectly Orthodox way of thinking. It will save you from sectarianism and help you to understand why traditional Christianity preserves something that is beyond religion.
...All religion, including Orthodoxy as an external institution, has inherent dangers. That is why [an author] very clearly distinguishes Orthodoxy, as a "way," from the modern superficial concept of religion, which also prevails among some Orthodox...
...This is what Orthodoxy is: correct belief (Orthodoxy) and correct practice (Orthopraxy), which together form and confirm the natural, true existence of the human.
...Just as Baptism among the early Christians was called "photismos" (illumination), so the Church Fathers equate salvation with "theosis" (deification). Hence, theology is about what is lived, not what is proclaimed. Theology and Scripture describe the glory of God. They do not contain it. That glory is bestowed on us through living a transformative theology.
...We can recognize, once we see what sick religion is, that we must seek healthy religion. That is our rational decision. But that decision is a prelude to experiencing God in mystery and in what is trans-rational. And there is the ineluctable rub. Few people, even Orthodox, care to do that. Hence, popular religion and its superficies and dangers.
You might then ask, "Why have Orthodox Churches?" The answer is simply because the Mysteries that the Church contains and dispenses serve to introduce one to all of the higher aspects of religion.
Like any other confession, Orthodoxy (or much of what exists in the name of Orthodoxy) can be followed and practiced in an empty, non-effective way and can convey much of the sickness of religion.
...we assess [a faith] by what it is capable of achieving maximally, not how it goes astray in a minimalistic sense. In the end the barometer of ecclesiastical truth is the Christian life and the life of deification that the Church can produce.
...And how do we purify ourselves? By the continual observance of Orthodoxy and its spiritual regimen: living in but not of the world, submitting our wills to God's, fasting, praying, accepting all as coming from God (including health and sickness, good and bad), and seeking to be among the blessed who are described on the Beatitudes (the Sermon on the Mount). We must also trust God and not ourselves and sacrifice for our Faith as the one most precious thing in our lives. Anything less leaves one sick with religion.
We do not, of course, do this only by our own efforts, but in synergy with God, Whom we discover within us, and within the Church, which, when it is doing as it should and adheres to Holy Tradition, administers the deifying Mysteries of the Church, which illumine us.
...God acts through Grace everywhere. Just as one is not, by becoming Orthodox, automatically cured of imperfection and impurity, so we are not in a position, as mere humans, to deny God's Providence. All that we can say is that we know where purification is - in Christ and in Orthodoxy - and that it is our duty to maintain that truth undefiled (hence our clear opposition to ecumenism) and to call others to the experience of Orthodoxy in its genuine form.
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It was good for me to reread this.
